Imagine my joy this morning when I sat down and saw that Ask.com - my favorite little underdog - had taken over the top spot at Techmeme with news of a massive relaunch.

You can find detailed reviews of the new Ask.com at Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, and The New York Times, as well as commentary from John Battelle, David Dalka, and Ask’s Gary Price.  Heck… there are dozens of reviews and comments available via Techmeme.

I think the review bases are covered.  Ask.com has a new forward-thinking look, a ton of new functionality (as well as better utilization of existing tools), and many under-the-hood enhancements.  Ask’s new “Morph” algorithm tries to pull content from a variety of sources to bring different types of data to users based on a simple text search.

I’ve been playing with it all morning.  And I like it a lot.

I’m glad to see Ask.com make some bold changes.  It really has set itself apart from the rest of the top 5 herd with this update.  And if it wants to stand out in a world of giants… that’s what it needed to do.  People will either love the new Ask.com or they’ll hate it.  I personally think this is the direction search is heading.  But your average user is slow to make change.

Time will tell how well the move paid off.  I think it will.  I know I’ve had a blast playing with Ask today and I’m sure other people will have similar experiences.

But search isn’t just fun and pretty new skins.

The one thing that I have said for a while now - and I will continue to say - is that Ask.com’s biggest weakness is not it’s algorithm (which is top notch).  It’s not the interface.  It’s certainly not the “tools” they provide.

The main thing holding Ask.com back is its crawler.

Ask.com simply doesn’t index enough of the web.  And the parts that it does index are sometimes grossly out of date.  I’m not sure what it is about the technology behind Ask that causes this… but now that the new Ask.com is launched… that’s what I’d focus on.  You know… if I was Ask.

If you could put Ask’s new interface and tool set on a bigger, fresher index of the web… and apply it’s great algorithm to piece together the results… you would have one knock-out search engine.

Congrats Ask!  I love the new look.  You’ve obviously been very busy and I hope that all of your efforts pay off.