Ask.com, the fourth most popular search engine, has recently increased their efforts to gain a more controlling portion of the search market share. Last night, they launched a brand new interface that features a lot of improvement based on their AskX test interface.

The new interface takes a couple of clues from Google’s interface. There’s a lot of whitespace although you can select a variety of skins which will change the background image of the page (in the future you’ll be able to upload your own). Google recently added this feature to their own iGoogle start page feature.

When Google launched it’s Universal Search last month, the competitors took note. Ask’s search results now feature a 3-column structure. The first column features the search box as well as various queries to further narrow or expand your search. The middle column is your typical search results with sponsored ads controlling the top three positions. Finally, the third column features results from various other types of search, such as images, blogs, and video.

Many search engines are moving to this “all for one” search approach - but is it really what the user’s want? To be perfectly honest, if I didn’t know the changes beforehand I would have simply ignored the search filters as well as the third column simply due to ad blindness (my browsing skills are trained to just ignore items formatted/positioned like this).

Is this enough for Ask.com to pull into the top 3? I doubt it. We’re people of habit and right now - our habit is Google.