Today, I have seen that interface design of Ask has changed.

New Design Interfance on Ask.com

The default interface of Ask.com (USA version)

As you can see, you can now directly choose your research type (web, images, city, news, blogs, videos, maps&directions, shopping) as Google Universal Research : this is Ask 3D. My first impress is good, even if I think that is just a enhanced copy of Google Universal Research. However, Ask is cool and it proposed a skin option. You can choose a skin for your search engine.

Choose your design for your Ask main page !

A better interface of Ask 3D =)

I have tried to search some news with Ask and that was interesting. Ask 3D suggests some keywords during your research. Besides, I have noticed that search results is better… Even if interface of search results looks like Exalead.

Ask_interface_research.jpg Ask_interface_research_results.jpg

A new search results interface for Ask

Here are 3 columns. On the left side you can see some suggestions from Ask to help you in your research. Differences between “Narrow your research” and “Expand your research” is not enormous but this a good idea to have a part named “Related names”. However, I don’t see a big difference with old interface, concerning semantic research…
Conclusion : Ask, like Google, has upgraded its search engine to obtain an integrated set of search results on one page. Final results seems better than Google. So this is a good move by Ask.com to improve its search results presentation. However, I am waiting for a new algorithm of an innovating search results interface… I really have the impress to have a mix between Google and Exalead.