The New Ask.com Blasts Off

It's...alive!!!

On Sunday night at around 8:15pm PST we officially launched the new Ask.com into orbit. As usual with these things, it's not without some bugs here and there, so we'll get right on those. But she's up there and she's a beaute.

Our press release is here for those of you who missed the news. Thanks to all of you who covered the launch yesterday, from news pubs to bloggers. We appreciate it.

We started work on the new site in earnest last Fall. Besides the coming rebrand as Ask.com, we took the opportunity to try to build a better foundation for many of the tools we've built over the past 3 or 4 years. That led us to several months of iterations and testing on what eventually became the "Toolbox" on the right side of the new homepage. Trust us, it may look simple but it didn't start out that way. :)

The Toolbox puts all of our search tools on "speed dial", as Jim was quoted saying in the AP article. We fell in love with its simple usability, as well as the Zen feeling you get from clicking through the different tools, watching the homepage transform seamlessly as you go. This solved two problems for us: 1) Educating our users more strongly about the existence of these tools; and 2) Integrating them in a way that was both easy to use and didn't add too much clutter. We also added the ability to customize it, open and close it, and drag and drop the ordering of it. In the future, we plan to open it up so you can add whatever tools you want. We also plan to take it to content, for example being able to see your RSS feeds on the left by clicking Reader on the right. (Right now the Bloglines link goes to your Bloglines MyFeeds page, if you are a registered user.)

In addition to the new homepage, we also launched new Maps, Encyclopedia, Kids, and Desktop search products yesterday. They are also described in the press release.

We are particularly proud of the Maps product. We feel that it is the best Maps product in the market for building an itinerary for a journey, through differentiated tools like draggable pushpins, right-click to add locations, the ability to add up to 10 locations, aerial photography views, an open/close slider, and the "Play" button. There are also some cool hotkey functions AND the opportunity to purchase photos of any aerial view by clicking "Get Photo". In the future we'll use Maps as a platform for many more products, such as our next rev on Local. Stay tuned.

One thing we didn't really change with this release was our results page. In fact the only real change we made was switching from Verdana to Arial font. (Bonus points for whoever actually noticed that!) Though we tested several changes, we kept coming back to the current page, which is already the most differentiated in the market through its integration of Smart Answers, Binoculars, and Zoom related search on nearly all queries, and through our lack of ads down the right side of the page.

This is just the beginning for the new Ask. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.