Suggestions for Ask.com

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After reading some comments from SES in San Jose it looked like Ask.com was looking for suggestions on ways to improve. I was working with Rand of SEOMoz.com trying to get other SEO bloggers to participate. While we didn’t get the level of participation I hoped for it still seemed worth while enough to go through.

• One of the things you’ll often hear me complain about with Google is there over-reliance on authority. IMHO Ask.com doesn’t place enough value on authority. For example looking at [lost tv show] I’m glad to see a fan site ranking that high, however I think the ABC site should be above it. The same thing is true for [big brother all stars] and [survivor cook islands], the result for [emmy awards] is more i line with what I expect to see.
• Looking at the above SERP’s you’ll notice there was an editorial listing at the very top of every page. However we’ve all been trained to thinking those top results are paid listings. If you’re not searching to buy a product or service, mentally you skip right over it and look for the organic results. I’d swap those listing down below the paid listings.
• Yahoo recently nixed blog listings on their news SERP’s. The main reason they gave was spam, this leaves vacuum to be filled. Why not implement the feature, but use number of subscribers to a blog as an authority filter.
• Go deep, looking at some big sites who should be well crawled I don’t see numbers I expect for example [go.disney.com] only has 27,000 results Google thinks [go.disney.com] has almost 3 times as many pages. Look at [apple.com] only 60,000 pages compared to Google’s 1.7 million [apple.com] pages.
• Lastly a big part of Google’s success was the grass roots movement. Go out of your way to court the tech set and the bloggers, they are the sneezers who can help you grow the most. People may see your commercials and they may try your search engine, but chances are they will ask their “computer friend” what she or he thinks of ask.com first, and most of them aren’t recommending you, at that point it’s game over.

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