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I read an article about Ask.com dumping Jeeves in order to let the world know that it’s a serious search engine. In the article, one of their fellows bragged about how their search engine is on par with Google.

So, I went there and did a search for myself, to see how many of my sites would come up. I got very few search results compared with Google, which has indexed everything I’ve put online - in part because they have this GREAT and easy to use “Submit Your Site to Us” feature. Well, at Ask.com, they have no such feature, so in the search results, I got stuff that was at least 4 months old, and with the wrong URLs - obviously, not current and not useful.

I looked for the Site Submit feature on their site, but it was nowhere to be found. Then I looked at their FAQs, where they pompously state that their crawler will find and index my site automatically. What, is it all-knowing? There’s nothing mysterious here. A crawler can’t find a site if there are no links to follow to it. So if the site’s new, and nobody’s linking to you, even if you’ve got great content, Ask.com won’t find you. That’s just plain silly - so I wrote them an email a couple of weeks ago:

You do not provide an easy way for site owners to submit their sites to your search engine. I did a search for myself and found almost nothing. How do you expect to keep your search results current, if you do not crawl new URLs? How do you expect to compete with Google, as you say you want to do, when I can’t re-submit my site for crawling once I’ve made major changes? It doesn’t make sense. I hope you’re not just posturing - that’s only for politicians.

To my surprise, they responded this morning:

We appreciate your interest in having your site listed on the Ask.com search engine. Unfortunately we are no longer offering a Site Submission program at this time. As a result of some recent enhancements, we’re indexing even more Web pages than ever, and your site should appear in our Search index as a result of our ongoing “crawling” of the Web for new and updated sites and content.

Okay, so we’re back to square one. These people just don’t get it, do they? How are they going to get to a new site if it’s not linked from other sites? They can’t. And how are they going to index the content on my existing sites properly, even with their “fancy” crawler, if the latest updates that show up in their database are from months ago? They can’t.

Clearly, they’re inferior to Google.

Updated 2/17/08: Guess what? Ask.com has since revised their policy and they allow web publishers to ping them when they post new content. It’s the right thing to do. The Yahoo and MSN search engines are also doing the same thing.

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