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Ask.com plans to improve its search results to photos, video and related searches. Responding to growing consumer demand for more than text links, Ask.com seeks to improve how users compose queries, review search results, and then find what they want.
Ask3D divides search into three panels and uses a series of patent-pending technologies to help arrive at its results.

A content-matching system called Morph analyzes what is typed in Ask.com's text search box and decides what categories of search the user may be most interested in linking to.
This improvement means that a search on Ask.com for 'pizza' turns up a list of ways to narrow or expand your search on the left side of the results page, including answers to the question 'Where did Pizza come from?' for those with an appetite for history.
Instead of clicking on links to photos or videos, users can simply roll over images and see them enlarged. Videos start playing inside the search page.

Ask's new video search is powered by Blinkx Plc, a video search service that has cataloged 12 million hours of online audio and video programming from 130 media partners.Blinkx said it has agreed to deliver video search to three of the top five Web search sites - AOL, Ask and Microsoft's MSN.
Ask is not alone in seeking to merge multimedia types of search as more Web users now have Internet connections fast enough to display images and video quickly.

Three weeks ago, Google introduced Google Universal Search, combining its different search services into one single search for Web sites, news, video and other results on one page.

Ask has been very innovative with new ways to use search, many analysts agree. But its cooler features have not translated into market share, as Google's share has grown steadily in the past two years relative to the other sites.