Good Morning Silicon Valley

Hoping to close its gap with the Big Three of Web search - Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft - Oakland-based Ask.com has unveiled a revamped search results page that it’s calling Ask3D.

Beyond columns listing search-narrowing suggestions and resultant links, the revamped results page offers additional categories — images, video, encyclopedia entries and the like — in panels on the right side. It’s a cleaner, more-integrated design and one that features results based on the type of the search request as well as the location of the computer used to enter the information.

Google started inserting more video, photos and book references on its primary results page last month, but Ask.com’s 3D concept represents a more radical shift, making the additional content categories still more prominent.

Whether this kind of move can help Ask.com overcome its position as the Shemp to the Big Three’s Larry, Curly and Moe, only time will tell, but it could represent an important shift in usability.

“Google and other search engines, including Ask.com until now, have looked at search as a linear process, where one step follows another in a strict progression. What we actually know is that it’s not linear at all,” Ask.com Vice President Doug Leeds told SearchEngineWatch.com. “People will type a query, review results, click through, then come back to review results, refine a query…it’s an iterative process.”