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When it comes to the appearance of your default search-results page, the times they are a changin'.
Ask.com, the fourth-ranked search engine behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, launched a new design of its search page Tuesday called Ask3D. It finds multimedia content like images, videos and music and presents those alongside traditional text-based results in a three-paned web interface.
"Design innovation is a big part of the direction we're taking," says Ask.com's vice president of products and user experience Daniel Read. "Users are desiring a more sophisticated search interface."
The redesign points to a new paradigm for web search as the major engines move away from the traditional results page design -- a single column of text-based results -- in favor of a richer experience that incorporates a wider range of content.
"For a long time, search engines seemed to feel that they couldn't alter their basic design without alienating searchers," says Search Engine Land editor in chief Danny Sullivan. "Search engines are finally feeling confident to make use of different designs."
The new Ask search-results page is divided into three sections -- hence, "Ask3D." The large center section contains traditional text results from web pages. New page previews in this section provide information like whether a page requires plug-ins or if it contains popup windows. Ask will also display the size and download time of a results page. Right now, the download time is based on a 56-K modem connection, but Read says Ask will soon incorporate a connection-speed sniffer to provide an accurate estimate for download times.
A column on the left contains a search box and links that expand or narrow results. The right-hand column features a range of context-sensitive multimedia results that vary, based on the search terms. For instance, a search for pop star Gwen Stefani brings in multimedia content such as images, videos and music files. A similar search for presidential hopeful Barack Obama returns different auxiliary content, such as news stories, Wikipedia entries and videos.
Ask's new approach is comparable to those taken by other players currently stretching the boundaries of search. For example, Clusty and Google-owned SearchMash use different ranking algorithms or integrate multimedia into results pages to enhance the traditional web-search experience.
In May, Google debuted similar "media integrated" search results in its new Universal Search product, which combines text-based search results with videos and images, along with results from news and books searches onto one page. Universal Search returns a wider range of content than a standard text-based engine, but the results pages still look a whole lot like Google's traditional results pages.
Read says his company opted for a more disruptive approach.
"Ask3D is a much more significant leap forward in terms of interface design," he says. "I don't think users are going to notice the changes in Google because the interface remains the same as it was seven years ago."
Rebecca Lieb, editor in chief of the ClickZ network, which includes the popular Search Engine Watch blog, believes that Ask's underdog status may work to its advantage.
Google currently leads the search market by leaps and bounds. According to ComScore Media Metrix data, Google had 107 million unique visitors in April. Yahoo search followed with 74.4 million. Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com were neck and neck with 48.7 million and 47.9 million respectively.
"Ask can really afford to go out on a limb and take some chances that you can't afford to do when you're number one," Lieb says.
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