Ask.com Goes Down on Earth Day, Then Mimics Bing
Ask.com went down this morning for at least an hour with what appears to be a server DNS Failure.
Ask.com DNS Failure
Maybe Ask decided to observe Earth Day by shutting down their website for an hour to save energy. I wonder how many searches were lost saved as a result? 🙂
@tonytwotoes even had a rather humorous suggestion for how to proceed during the downtime: https://tinyurl.com/d6lkzo.
Tweet: ZOMG ask.com is down!!! what am i to do...
When Ask finally managed to come back up their homepage had an Avatar theme with some striking similarities to Bing:
Ask Earth Day Interactive Boxes
Ask.com Earth Day Interactive Boxes
Bing Earth Day Interactive Boxes
Bing.com Earth Day Interactive Boxes
Ask Earth Day Interactive Box #1
Ask.com Earth Day Interactive Box #1
Ask Earth Day Interactive Box #2
Ask.com Earth Day Interactive Box #2
Ask Earth Day Interactive Box #3
Ask.com Earth Day Interactive Box #3
Bing Earth Day Interactive Box #1
Bing.com Earth Day Interactive Box #1
Bing Earth Day Interactive Box #2
Bing.com Earth Day Interactive Box #2
Bing Earth Day Interactive Box #3
Bing.com Earth Day Interactive Box #3
Bing Earth Day Interactive Box #4
Bing.com Earth Day Interactive Box #4
It seems that Bing has become a trendsetter in search these days with their interactive innovations first being mimicked by Google and now by Ask.
What do you think of the similarities between the Ask.com and Bing.com homepages? Is this just 1 time mimic by Ask or something that we will see more often? Feel free to share your thoughts.
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Reader Comments
Happy Earth Day to all! Btw, Ask has been doing those take overs with the interactive boxes way before Bing. I do recall one takeover they made to Lowes with this feature early last year…
Happy Earth Day to you also Nick and thanks for the info. I did not catch any previous Ask interactive boxes on their homepage, but since today was for the Avatar DVD release, I would tend to believe that these “interactive homepages” are only commercial in nature. A new twist on homepage advertising…
Feel free to let us know if you run across any other interactive Ask homepages.