I just came across this report (pdf) from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google and Ask.com are the fastest-growing search engines based on the number of U.S. searches. This report showed growth of 23 percent and 25 percent respectively in October 2006, compared with the year before. In market share, it showed Ask.com in fifth place, just behind AOL.

Though Ask.com they are not updated their index as quickly as Google, and even when I search my own weblog through them, it showed no result with TagEdge.com (up to this moment), however they did provided a different search experience for me. Whenever I want to search a working paper, the results showed the information that I want for me in a fast manner without having to enter an elaborate boolean search query.

I believed in the search industry, Ask.com has thus established their credibility as the most significant challenger to Google. They are more user-friendly, attributed to their fewer advertisements strategy. They do not believe this search business is about advertising. Thus, the concept of “fail to compete on advertising is to fail” is not valid in Ask.com.

When you look at their technology. The Smart Answers for the purpose of suggested links; the Zoom feature that allows people to narrow or broaden a search; Binoculars that offers a web page’s preview; the walking directions from their map services; the “ExpertRank”, a totally different ranking system when compared to PageRank of Google, and etc. They have improved a lot in their search engine. I wonder they offer social search?

For now, I’m just waiting for some of these underdogs, one of them is Ask.com inventing their technologies and turn themselves into significant players.