ASK added a ticking clock with local time to all local search results. It’s been a while since I last used ASK for local search and it appears as if they added weather, clock, pictures and all kinds of useful stuff…
For example, a search for Las Vegas, NV shows:

ASK announced today the addition of health related answers to their “Smart Answers” engine. The answers which made available through a cooperation with healthline.com, a health search engine, cover a wide range of medicine each with links to related topics such as Composition, Dosage, Forms, Interactions, Precautions and Side Effects.
Here’s the results for a simple search for Naproxen on ASK:

From the official press release:
Ask.com and other major consumer-facing businesses are leveraging Healthline’s content to quickly obtain accurate and relevant medical definitions, images, and links to doctor-reviewed content to enhance the consumer experience and improve the brand ensuring the consumer experience.
As …read more

Last week CNET News.com sent 8 questions to each search engine in an attempt to rank them based on their own observation of themselves. This is in an attempt to help people understand the different policies used by each engine on specific issues. The engines included AOL, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo and the questions asked included:

What search-related data–including IP addresses, cookie IDs, user identities, and search terms–do you retain?
How long do you retain those data?
If you retain data for a limited period of time, is it completely deleted (in such a way that the data and backups cannot …read more

As ASK is getting ready for the launch of ASKEraser, its anonymous search tool due out soon, it joined forces with MSN in an effort to create an “industry standard” to better protect consumer privacy. The two, who are more of the “market followers” in the industry joined yesterday and proposed a project which would “bring together businesses, advocacy groups and academics to develop a set of guiding principles that would help alert users when their online behavior is being tracked and for how long that information is retained.”
Privacy issues became public concern with Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick and …read more

While Google keeps on getting more and more hear for insisting on keeping surfer’s information infinitely (in Internet terms at least), ASK seems to have gotten the picture and announced today a new search tool which will forget about you altogether, Sort of like “10 Second Tom” from 50 First Dates…
The new tool, called AskEraser will offer users complete control over their privacy when searching for information: With AskEraser, people can ensure that their search history will not be retained by Ask.com. Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. Once …read more

Earlier this month, ASK introduced its new interface along with a new ad campaign. This week, it added just another ad to the mix, this time it is a woman who “found what she was looking for”… Apparently she was looking for Kato Kaelin ?!? who according to ASK was “a footnote in the notorious 1995 murder trial of retired football star O.J. Simpson“.

Along with the new 3D interface, ASK launched a television ad campaign aimed at driving more traffic to try it out. The commercial is themed as “I got what I’m looking for” with half naked women dancing in the background.
Check it out on YouTube:

ASK announced this week the launch of its new contextual ad network, competition to Google’s Adsense, Yahoo’s YPN and MSN’s ContentAds. The new platform is set to launch on May 21st, however, it is still unclear when it will be available to the public. This new feature is an extension of the ASL 2.0 (ASK Sponsored Listings) which was launched last October.
So, besides the fact you may hare Adsense why should you consider ASK’s product? From the ASL official announcement:

* It gives publishers more control over yield and relevancy
* It gives publishers more creative ad unit opportunities
* It allows both …read more

I’ve seen a few mentions of a possible index update on both Google Images and ASK, and while some people claim that their traffic doubled, other’s dropped.
Personally I do not track these indexes and cannot comment. I did, however, run into a Google images #1 result which has not existed for several months now and which made me wonder how old this index really is…
Anyone else is seeing any changes?

Technigma notes today that ASKX.com (ASK’s “futuristic” testing environment) has it’s logo linked to a Flickr page yay2dot0logoparody which is a parody about the different Web2.0 logos.