During my interview with Jim Lanzone, we discussed Ask's current standing and where he expects prominent search engine to appear within next few years. Obviously Jim could not provide specifics on technology they plan on including; however, I was able to garner some idea of company's vision:

Jim gave serious kudos to Google and Yahoo! for creating relationships with ‘hidden web'; vast information resources once missed by average search engine such as Library of Congress, US Supreme Court Audio, NPR, etc.. According to Jim these types of relationships are definitely going to play a role in future development at Ask. The problem is time, they plan on making some inroads this year but it will take a while before Ask can match kind of advances that Yahoo or Google have made. This is especially true since Index Express was phased out; initially this was to be model for uncovering hidden web.

AskJeeves is very focused on providing a quality user experience. This is evidenced strongly by Ask's current clean interface and Smart Search ideology that “search experience is as important as results themselves”. From what I could gather, Ask's goal is to minimize successful search experience to one click.

A fresher index was noted which indicates a strong desire to begin spidering web sites more frequently in near future. Jim did not elaborate on this, however, I speculate that this means isolating web sites that are updated regularly and spidering them more often.

Currently News section of AskJeeves is populated using Moreover; a popular and reliable news syndication resource. At moment, Ask only minimally controls results of its Moreover results with a basic algorithm. This is a major difference between AskJeeves and its search competitors Google and Yahoo!; Ask is only engine without its own news spider! When asked, Jim noted that advances in Ask's news asset will begin to take place in second quarter of this year.

What else? At this point in interview I encountered familiar and completely understandable ‘wall of vague'; to quote Jim Lanzone, AskJeeves plans to “move into different areas of search and apply our search engines to new areas of web and make improvements to methodologies that determine relevance of web.” Well said!

Colour blindness It is estimated that one in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of colour blindness (http://www.iee.org/Policy/Areas/Health/cvdintro.cfm). You can check how Internet users with different strains of colour blindness are viewing your website at http://www.tesspub.com/colours.html.

Deaf users Deaf users are able to access Internet in much same way as able-bodied people with one key exception – audio content. If it is a key function of your website for people to be able to hear a message, then be sure to provide written transcripts.

Keyboard/voice only users Some of your site users do not have access to a mouse when browsing Internet. Try putting yourself in their position by navigating your website using only tab, shift-tab, and return keys.

Other users Other people who may access your website that have disadvantages include: 1 Epileptic users who must always be careful to avoid seeing flickering between 2 and 55 Hz 2 Web users from outside your industry who may not understand industry jargon or acronyms 3 Web users whose first language is not English and who may not be able to comprehend complicated language

To really put yourself in position of one of these web users try out DRC’s inaccessible website demonstration at http://www.drc-gb.org/newsroom/website.asp.