Marketing Logic

So far, the Google-free week test has been going well. I made the commitment last week after a dinner with Ask.com at Search Engine Strategies. Some of us felt that we just had to “Give Ask a Chance”, as Ask seems to be the favorite underdog of the SEO community.

This was extremely easy to do. I use the FireFox Browser, which you should be using as well! There is an Ask search bar plug-in that allows me to search on any engine; I simply had to set it to Ask.com. There is also an IMDB plug-in, but that’s another post.

I haven’t had to do any hard-core searching, mainly some vanity searches, which are typical after an SES. I have had to search for a few products, which came up fairly well. I find that Ask does extremely well for content-related searches, such as techie questions. A few searches for current events bring up blogs all over the first page, which is very fresh, relevant and cool.  I stopped watching the news and reading the newspaper a few years ago – I get all my news from blogs now, but I haven’t yet decided if that’s good or bad.

The image search for “Reuters fake photo” was nowhere near relevant, as I got a picture of blue Viagra pills. However, the search results were spot-on.

My only hesitation was when I check how much of my own site was included in the search results. Ask had a good chunk of it – enough to make me happy. However, I did see that one of my redirected domains, www.site-logic.com (which is parked), was showing up in the results. That didn’t site too well with me. It doesn’t seem to affect me much, but it did bring up some more (sigh) redirect questions.