Ask Jeeves offers zoom search feature

18 July 2005 17:16 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Ask Jeeves, the search engine, has introduced a new service in the UK that allows users to "Zoom" into their searches.

The service which launched in the US in May and has today come to the UK arm of the search engine gives users suggestions to narrow or expand their searches by "zooming in", or expanding their search by "zooming out" to explore new ideas.

Zoom uses Ask's clustering ability of the company's Teoma search technology, which breaks the Web into topic communities.

Type in the word Sun for example and you get; “Facts on the Sun”, “Hot Sun”, “Cartoon Sun”, “Sun Microsystems”, “Layers of the Sun”, “Sun Mass”, “How Big Is the Sun”, “What Is the Sun Made of”, and “Tattoo Suns” in Narrow Search. In Expand Search you get; Moon, Earth, Solar System , Space, and Uranus.

While the new feature works for most searches, the software is not without its bugs. Searching for “Ask Jeeves” for example brought up two porn sites and the word “Poo” in the extended search box.

Tony Macklin, Vice President European Product Management at Ask Jeeves in the UK said “It's early days for the service, and we admit that there is still bugs to be ironed out.”