Ask.com Favoring Organic?

The Search Engine race has been stagnent for a while. Yes, really, nobody has broken the mold of Google, instead they try to compete with Google at what Google does best.. search. And they lose.

However Google's home page is getting a bit dull, and there is no doubt they are paying a real loss of opportunity price for having such a clean search page. Nor can they test anything new on the page without a huge outcry... take their change of the Fav Icon for example. (UUUUGLY).

Ask.com has been trying to build on top of the Google model. The switched back to a clean search only home page some time ago. They have since then been testing small variances to this page. First by adding a single image add top left of the page. The ad was for Match.com.

Now, they are playing around with the results pages.

Today I found that the PPC ads were placed in second position, with an organic listing coming in at the top. I'm glad to see that Ask.com is mixing things up without going too far.

I'm sure my SEO friends are very happy to see this type of testing as it lends a great deal of value to their services.