Ask.com, the little search engine that could, might be going through a round of under the hood updates.  According to a post at Search Engine Roundtable, many website owners and webmasters have noticed a recent spike in Ask.com traffic: 

Seems to me that Ask underwent a recent update. My traffic just about doubled. Anyone else seeing anything.

I have not seen any other posts out there on this. Nor have I noticed specific changes with this specific site.

But I looked at some of my clients sites and as of Thursday, it appears they have seen an increase in traffic from Ask.com.

Despite the lack of first hand evidence here, it'd be interesting to know what's behind these reports.  Maybe it's just coincidence.  Maybe Ask.com is just getting used a little more these days.  Who knows.  It's hard for me to verify because, of the over 800 pages that Google and Yahoo have indexed from the Internet Marketing Monitor, Ask.com has indexed 3.  I'm not holding my breath to see a big spike in traffic.

But that bit of information does highlight my main gripe with Ask.com.  As you can tell from previous posts on the subject, I'm generally a fan of Ask.com.  I think their algorithm is great.  I like the search interface (Matt isn't as much of a fan).  And while I'm not sure I could use it on a daily basis, I even like to play around with AskX.

My gripe isn't with Ask.com's search.  My gripe is with Ask.com's indexing policy.  Ironically enough, Search Engine Roundtable also has a post about that this morning.  Unlike Google and Yahoo, Ask.com has no known method of manually submitting a URL, sitemap, etc.  Instead, they rely on their crawling technology to discover new content.

If you ask me… that's grossly inefficient.

The Internet Marketing Monitor has a lot of content.  Google and Yahoo are full of IMM content.  Heck… Live.com is full of IMM content (although it ranks us well on strange things).  We've got a lot of incoming links.  Yet Ask.com has only indexed a total of 3 pages (and the main index isn't one of them).

It seems to me that the addition of a submission procedure could help Ask.com with it's biggest shortcoming compared to the big guys:  content.  Google and Yahoo index much more of the web than Ask.com.  And if it's taking more than 4 months to get new content indexed, Ask is going to stay perpetually behind.

Maybe their goal isn't to index as much of the web.  Could be a strategy of some kind.  Who knows.  But it still wouldn't hurt to have the ability to drop a sitemap (or even URL) off at Ask.com's door.