I see from the fact that it is still everywhere that Ask.com is not taking a great deal of notice of the massive amount of negative feedback to its truly awful information revolution campaign. Well, aside from the fact it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, I’d think it’s important we dig down into the detail of this whole sworded episode which must have left google quaking in their boots:
- It’s not accessible (iframe on home page)
- It’s not even accessible to engines (Ask hasn’t indexed the first sentence on the main page)
Although funnily enough, Google can see it – if not ranking it very highly!
- It’s got that whole “fixed height” thing that people from traditional media make digital agencies do becuase they think “people won’t scroll”. Ironic if the client’s a search engine.
- Loads of nonsense text on the home page
- Dropped navigation on “Why ask” page
- The sign-up page is white text on a yellow background – completely unusable (am I the only person who’s signed up? – I had to use my decoder ring)
- No t-shirt (due to high demand, I’ll bet)
- Flogs and fake video blogs – full on, invented human beings with obnoxious invented marketing nonsense in them (Sell a couple more t-shirts and buy a copy of Cluetrain chaps).
- Some fairly obvious fake comments.
- Same title on every page (tut tut) and system generated page names !!! ?
- Really annoying interface errors (scroll bars in the middle of pages, non-standard search buttons, incorrect ident top left)
- The word “revolutionistas”
- Spelling Google with a lower case “g”
- Ask doesn’t even qualify as the “other search engine”. That’s Yahoo or Windows Live. Ask.com is the “unused search engine”.
- This is supposed to sound like the way “real people speak”
“What could possibly make a sociology graduate, a computer engineering dropout, a silent expert of monkey peer groups and a genius handyman come together? Sheer determination & a shared passion to evolve the way people search, and a common love of jammy dodgers.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and take my medicine.
nice
Genius post. Ask take note.