I played with the new ask.com. It has really become new — many features from Ask Jeeves are gone and the new site is much improved in many respects. I particularly liked their maps. You can get driving and walking directions. More importantly, the simple animation of your directions is neat feature — it animates your driving direction. Simple but useful in my opinion because you get an idea of how you are going to get there.
Is this the signal that ASK.COM wants to challenge some of the biggies?
Yes its good. But they look so similar to Google. Found another post who spoke about the same http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006385.html
Yes, quite good features, especially I like that peel function, and you can select different themes. Things are going bit slow for ask.com to challenge the big dogs but one can’t ignore the fact of increasing popularity of sites like ask.com
Every big fellow on the internet wants to increase the traffic and for this they need to do something extra which no one other is doing. So with a combined effort, these people are making things easier for common man.!