ask google
This morning I had a job offering interview at Ask.com’s Italian R&D office in Pisa. Ask.com is a multi national company owning one of the most interesting search engines today, Ask.com.
Now, the meeting has been very interesting. The people working here in the Pisa office are really nice and they seem to know their job very well.
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, was born to handle queries in human language. Now it is becoming a really interesting alternative to Google. Their engine has some really nice features Google is missing and the search results are often more interesting.
Now, Google is still the number one search engine, this is out of any doubt, but people at Google are no longer working to push their search engine to new limits. Or at least this my own impression. They are working on lots of interesting projects (Google Earth/Maps, GMail & GTalk, Google Pages, Picasa, and many, many more!), but their search engine doesn’t seem innovative any more.
Ask.com’s ExpertRank has proven to be more useful than Google’s old PageRank. Just try to search Google for “python”. Found any snake in the first top 10 blue links? Now, look for “apache”. What if you are looking for the native americans or for the helicopter? Now search Ask.com for these queries and take a special look to the right side of the results page 
Well, I think we should take less things for obvious. People at Google are really doing a great job, but their search engine really needs to become more interesting or it won’t last that long