Why Ask.com Is A Joke

As many of you will know, Ask.com is one of the major search engines on the internet. In comparison with Google, Yahoo, and to an extent Bing, Ask.com is the smaller of the four players. Ask doesn’t have the user base of the other three search engines mentioned. In my opinion, this is in part to how Ask treats web masters.

For starters, Ask doesn’t even have a Web Master Tools or way to help web masters ensure their pages are indexed and optimized. On the flip-side, Google, Yahoo, and Bing all offer their own Web Master tools for people to verify and optimize their web sites.  Bing has Bing Webmaster Center, Yahoo has Yahoo Site Explorer, and Google has Google Webmaster Tools.

Ask.com does have the Ask Webmasters FAQ which in my opinion, is a very ugly and shoddy way of helping webmasters get their pages indexed by Teoma(The Ask Crawler). According to Ask, you can only submit your XML site map by putting in some ugly URL, and pinging their crawler through your web browser.  Webmasters have no way of knowing if Ask has correctly received the sitemap, parsed it, and even put pages in que to be indexed. This is a bad practice on Ask’s part, and has many webmasters just not even bothering to optimize their site for Ask. With Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft’s Bing, users can submit their sitemaps and get data back on how that sitemap has fared. This is far and away much better then what Ask.com offers.

It seems as if Ask.com is more worried about bundling their Ask toolbar that seems to come with almost every web plugin out there, rather then producing a good search engine. If Ask would implement some sort of webmaster tools, it would go a long way in handing an olive branch of good faith to encourage web masters to go the extra mile to improve the Ask results that would make it a much more relevant search engine.

For the reasons stated above, Many webmasters will not take Ask seriously until they put out some sort of webmaster tools to help webmasters get their sites verified and indexed. This would also help webmaster correct any problems that the Ask crawler may have with a web site.

Look on the bright side though, Ask offers such a great toolbar