Ask.com relaunch their search engine - and it's good!

Ask.com have today relaunched their website, and people, it's pretty good. I wasn't a massive fan of their Information Revolution marketing campaign, but it does seem now like they might be able to offer a real alternative to the uber-search engine, Google.

This new design means that if you enter a term it'll bring up a page which will display all the most relevant content, be it images, blogs, news or text, and there's an improved 'Binoculars' function which gives you a preview of what the page looks like and provides info on things like whether the site uses Flash. It's very much like the Snaps we had to dump, because y'all hated them so much....

It's now easy to widen or narrow your search, thanks to an area on the left which deals with your input (although I think this could do with being a little smaller - it takes up almost a third of the page).

The video search has also improved, and now when you hover over a thumbnail of the video, it plays a 30 second preview of the content (without sound).

Essentially, Ask are trying to acknowledge that people now want more than just text based websites - they're searching for audio files, blogs, videos and loads more. And I think they've made a massive leap forward in bringing that to people.

But that's just me. Go and have a play around, and see what you think. Then let us know.