I'd never used Ask, so after reading your post I compares a search for "cuda device to host memory copy" [1] and [2]
On google I saw no ads, and the links on the first page of results usually contain the search term.
On Ask there are ads, and they look very much like search results - there's no coloured background to identify them as such - and the search results contain irrelevant links to other Ask properties like "Can I Copy From Youtube? | Ask Jeeves" and "How Memory Stick | ask.co.uk/how"
Personally I won't be switching from Google to Ask.
I'll admit we might see different things - let me know if you'd like screenshots.
Good show. I checked your links on Maxthon [my IE without the IE baggage] and on Firefox (default browser with ABP add-on) for comparison.
1. On FF I have ABP installed, but there were no ads on Maxthon either for Ask. Is it due to "search bubble" or something else? Not sure. However, I too use uk.ask.com for my searches like you, so the 'bubble' should be the same for me as well. Hmmmm.
2. I got those two false positives also. But the rest of the search results were similar between both search engines (SO, rice.edu, stanford.edu, sourceforge, NVIDIA). I'll admit that I would have simply filtered those two anomalies visually and not given it a second thought. But wouldn't you say, search-for-search, the landing pages were pretty similar in the results returned (barring those two stupidities)?
Managed to find a suitably large monitor. Here's my landing page for comparison. On Opera with Adblocker installed. I get the same results on Maxthon that has no addons to block ads. Let me know if you want to see Maxthon screen.
Yes, definitely been an interesting discussion. Thanks :-). Even more surprising for me was Maxthon's ad-free results as well.
FWIW, I'd definitely recommend looking into other alternative search engines like those I mentioned earlier. Usually my opera's speed dial default engine is dogpile [http://www.dogpile.com] that curates Google, Yahoo and Yandex results into one search result on one page. Definitely also worth looking into if you're interested.
I use Bing often, as I love Bing's homepage. Oh! those panoramic pictures. You got to give it to them. They definitely got that UX right. ;-)
Edit: Blekko and DDG are quite fab. And for an old contender, Lycos quite literally, rocks! Try them.
On google I saw no ads, and the links on the first page of results usually contain the search term.
On Ask there are ads, and they look very much like search results - there's no coloured background to identify them as such - and the search results contain irrelevant links to other Ask properties like "Can I Copy From Youtube? | Ask Jeeves" and "How Memory Stick | ask.co.uk/how"
Personally I won't be switching from Google to Ask.
I'll admit we might see different things - let me know if you'd like screenshots.
[1] http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cuda+device+to+host+memory+... [2] http://uk.ask.com/web?q=cuda+device+to+host+memory+copy