By Zaid Shuhaibar
While searching current events I came across an interesting article entitled What’s Up at Ask.com? A New Revamp on The Wall Street Journal website. According to the article the Internet search engine, Ask.com, plans to launch a redesign of their website in hopes of becoming more competitive against other Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo. In attempt to become more efficient, Ask is releasing a new feature that would simply present a direct answer to searches that are put in a question format. Therefore, one would not have to look through the many links that are given to find what they are looking for. Ask hopes their revamped design will attract more users, and help them become more competitive in the growing Internet Search Engine market.
In class, we began to work on our research for our second project of the semester. In our research, we will surely use the most efficient Internet search engines to assist us in finding relevant material. Today, most of us use Google as a primary search engines. However, after coming across this article, I may use Ask.com to find direct answers rather than clicking through many websites to find the same answer. I already checked out their new feature, Q&A Beta, and I found it fast and easy to use. In discussions, we continue to identify the new ways of research, and it appears that Internet research will continue to evolve as more search engines enhance their websites.
However, the new Ask.com, as well as any new search engines that may change in the future also present many questions. When will the Internet reach its potential and not be able to become any better? Will books and encyclopedias (not on the Internet) completely stop being used in the future? Also, we have discussed citing sources in class. How should a answer given directly from a search engine be cited, and is someone that did the original research to find that answer losing credit? Also, with search engines giving direct answers, could that make even Internet Articles inefficient for research?
2 Comments
October 6, 2008 at 11:25 pm
This sounds like an amazing improvement when it comes to search engines. Its always so annoying going through multiple sites just to find a simple answer that caused you to look online in the first place. Hopefully a site like this would have the citing taken care of and lead you to further sites for more information on the topic. My guess is that the answer comes from a webpage, therefore it will have a citation. It is much like wikepedia in the sense that its just a direct blurt on what you want, but comes with other resources. I think a site like this would be used primarily for quick answers and wouldn’t give you a full essay, but just a taste. This does raise a good question of when will the internet not be able to get any better? Who knows, I’m sure it will continue to improve because we would never have guessed 20 years ago that the internet would be what it is today.
October 8, 2008 at 2:14 pm
These are all such interesting questions because there really are no precise answers to any of them. As a student I would definitely be interested in using this site. Research can be a nightmare and often seems like a wild-goose-chase. The more straightforward a search engine makes research, it definitely seems like it would be better to use. However, siting this information would not be a fun task. The search engine would take out the struggle of finding the information, but siting the source would just create the same problems that the engine tried to eliminate. There is no perfect form of research and all of the improvements come with disadvantages. In the future there will still most likely use books and encyclopedias because they have been effective for so long and something that in comparison is short-lived (the internet) will not take the place of the books and encyclopedias of the past.