I have never been a big fan of Ask.com. I always felt that the company did a good job at marketing itself (who can forget Jeeves), but never really delivered when it came to search experience.

I remember back in the day, Ask’s search results were basically 50 PPC ads with 10 natural search results. Going to Ask at that point usually led to more frustration than anything.

A couple years back, Ask dumped Jeeves and decided to clean up their search results. Suddenly the piles of paid results were gone, and what was left looked like your average search engine. The only noteworthy feature was the little binoculars that gave screenshot previews of web pages. The problem was that even though you could use the cool binoculars, the results themselves were bound to be bad, since the search algorithm that Ask used was fairly ineffective.

Today though, I am happy to report that I am proud of the Ask team. Why? Their self titled “double-secret sandbox for testing Ask experiences of the future” or for short Ask X.

Ask X may very well be a preview of what your search experiences might look like in the future. From its triple pane layout to its integration of useful information like encyclopedia definitions, Ask X really does give a more satisfying search experience than Google or Yahoo.

Here is a screenshot for a Ask X search for the term “Denver”:

As you can see, Ask X not only gives web search results, but it gives maps, images, current weather, current time, dictionary and encyclopedia entries for Denver. - pretty much attaching the majority of the information you might be searching for about a city. Also, the pane on the left helps you narrow, expand and find related topics…and presents those options in a way that I would actually use (not like Yahoo’s related search terms that are pretty easy to miss).

I could picture myself using an interface like Ask X to really research a topic, as well as using it to just get quick info as well (like checking weather and traffic).

So take a few and go look at Ask X. While I don’t think this is going to make Ask any more popular in the long run, I think some of the concepts seen on Ask X could (should) be incorporated into future iterations of the tow major engines (Google and Yahoo).

[Thanks to the Lisa Barone at the Bruce Clay blog for her post on the topic]