ask.com-2 google-0 The Javier Bardem Story

I was having a conversation about an upcoming movie. It is called No Country For Old Men.

During conversation the actor named Javier Bardem came up. I wasn't sure who exactly he was. I went back to my desk to do a search. As touched upon very briefly in an earlier post, I'm doing a search engine bake-off between google and ask.com. For background I began using ask.com for the following reasons:

1) I saw a cool commercial for ask.com where there is no narration and the website and clicking does all the talking.

2) I'm a fan of Barry Diller (minus the Dennis Kozlowski-esque luxuries).

3) I am a (very small) share holder of IACI, so I figure I'd use one of their 238,427,530,238,492,034,234,626,234 products.

4) I definitely like to try different things as well as have the belief that certain types of competition breed better products.

I still have a knee-jerk reaction of typing in google.com when I open a web browser. This time was no exception. I figured all I'd need is an image of Javier Bardem so I did a Google image search instead of going to IMDB. Google images is billed as, "The most comprehensive image search on the web." Here is what I found:




Now I'm not saying that any software in any universe is perfect but recently as I've been performing searches with both search engines I've been getting better luck with ask.com. My bake-off is not by any means academic, but it's just my framed experiences. The thing that sucks most about the Javier Bardem search is that I did this at work. If you take a look at the first image that was returned by google, it is by no means a "SafeSearch" image. I hope that the people that monitor the web browsing at work don't think I look at questionable material. All jokes aside, lets look at what ask.com (which is not billed as the most comprehensive anything) returned:


When I first started using google a long time ago I really appreciated it's simplicity. I still do. Given that 100% of my home computers are not even "worthy of donations" as someone put it, my computer has a hard time processing a lot of busy stuff. ask.com is definitely busy compared to the likes of google. At home, something like a google is well suited to my tastes/needs. At work, one of my computers is not so old so ask.com works just fine and fast.

Although I do appreciate the simplicity of google, it is refreshing to see a website that intelligently employs useful tools such as wikipedia and news integration and also related names and other search suggestions. I don't necessarily need everything spoon fed to me, but it is cool to see that ask.com provides extra value when available and appropriate. I know that one could easily argue that an image search should have images only, but I feel like their layout has a good mix of nice-to-haves and focus on the image search. One major plus is that the images are at least suitable for work. It is funny to see that the first image that shows up on both search engines is not exactly what I was expecting. Maybe people who normally search for Javier Bardem are looking for that?

Without getting into a search engine religion argument, ask.com seems to be pulling ahead in my (poorly written) book. (Cliche high school newspaper style article ender coming up...) Now if I could just get a faster computer and stop myself from typing the G-word everytime I open a web browser...

EDIT: I just reviewed the now published post/images and realized that whether you're ask.com google.com or gramma's search engine, image searching still has a long way to go. Half the pictures returned by either search engine were way off. Unless there is a lot more to Javier's career than I'm aware of...