Web Searching in 3-D?

Searching on the web has been hot forever, or at least since Googlecreated its nifty homepage. But now Ask.comis coming up with a crazy new way to compete--Ask3D, a new search platform. It can't really be 3-D if it's on your computer screen, but it is a 3-panel interface, that delivers results with both Web links and video, images, and links to things like music, all one one page. Sort of like if you searched all of Google's categories (news, images, video) all with one click.

The new technology is called "Morph" -- and it does content-matching and ranking. Ask is trying to boost its popularity--in April just 5.1% of U.S. searchers used Ask.com, a tie with Aol.com's search engine. Then moving up the ladder, Microsoft gets 10.3% of the search market, and far above them Yahoocontrols 27% of search while Google has about 50%.

Ask.com is owned by Barry Diller's InterActive Corp -- and it used to be called AskJeeves.com.

Right now search is pretty similar across the board-- the interface will vary, and some will argue that some results are much better than others, but this might change the game. This is definitely a stark contrast to Google's simple design. So the question will be -- are searchers looking for more info or less?

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