With roughly a 4% market share in search, it’s not surprising that Ask.com has been aggressively marketing their service. The new campaign, launched this summer basically shows an invisible user accessing core features of the service and effectively demonstrating how it is different than Google. For obvious reasons, the recent commercial featuring a music search for KT Tunstall caught my eye…So I decided to check out Ask music search myself. For many artists the first result is biographic information provided by All Music Guide which also includes links to the artist’s discography, songs, and credits. The official band site and MySpace page also usually appear at the top of the results. You can narrow your search using specific predefined queries for content such as lyrics, tabs, chords, tour dates, CDs, videos, ringtones, posters and more. The page also provides links to expand your search which includes related artists and related names (e.g. band members) The right sidebar also also includes some special features such as images, playable popular tracks (from iLike), the Wikipedia entry, and videos from multiple sources.
The results really shine when searching for more popular artists or artists with fairly unique names. It’s not so good in other cases. For instance searching for Dengue Fever didn’t provide me with any band related results but instead provided links about the dreaded disease from which the band got their name. Cases like this leads me to believe search engines should come up with a universally accepted method to narrow searches specifically for music such as typing “Band: Dengue Fever”.
Overall, the Ask music search it pretty good and certainly much better than Google. However I would only use Ask when looking for web pages with artist information or articles. For searching artist related images, videos, songs, discographies and other music-specific targets Foxytunes Planet does a much more reliable and comprehensive job.