Ask.com Launches New Service To Find The Best Deals
Ask.com has launched a new service—ask.com/deals—dedicated to finding the best deals online. We don't know how well it works, but we like the tabs that let you quickly jump to free shipping offers and printable coupons. It might be a decent starting place if you're in the market for something and need to comparison shop first. Update: Our readers say it's not worth your time, at least in its current state—results are paltry and frequently old or expired.
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Looks pretty interesting, and has some nice features.
On the whole, I think Google's price comparison engine (froogle.com) is probably still a few steps ahead. Whenever I compare its results to others I've tried, it's pretty rare that I am able to find a better deal than what Google's engine presents.
On the other hand, if I'm looking for books, I think Bookfinder rocks, it ranks prices including shipping fees to your zipcode in its results. Google tries to do this with mixed results.
Ask.com should use their new service to find the best deal on a good bankruptcy attorney...
Ask.com killed Jeeves! You bastards!
Well, I just searched for the lowest price on some home theater components I was looking for, and the only 2 results I got were both expired deals (One from Onkyo and the other from Newegg). Looks like it needs a little work to be worthwhile.
@pecan 3.14159265: I thought Nerd was an insult while being called a Geek was a compliment since Geeks get paid for their mad skills! ;-)
Didn't work for me...just showed me broken links and expired offers.
@ddmeightball: Well, the definitions have muddled. Chuck is, after all, part of the Nerd Herd. Mr. Pi calls me a nerd, and doesn't mean anything derogatory by it. He also calls me a geek but he also enables my habits by giving me comic books instead of jewelry on special occasions. He gets to spend less money, and I get comic books.
@entitynein: True. You expect to find the best deals. It's still better to shop on Google, which gives you a list of what you want to buy and you can find the cheapest price on there, sale or no sale.
For example: I went to ask.com and entered Sangean and it gave me back some listings. When I went to Google and did the same search, I found the same model for $100 less even though it wasn't on sale. Google simply gave me outlets that sold it for less money.
@pecan 3.14159265: HA! Glad to see I'm not the only one who gets manga/comic books from their significant other as a gift!
Sorry, the Ask toolbar is malware, and I won't use their stuff.
I never found the price shopping sites to work well for me. I always seem to find the price cheaper at a place they haven't found that I know about from another source.
@calchip: I love Bookfinder ([www.bookfinder.com]). It's got better prices and quicker availability than Amazon much of the time, too.
i use google's shopping page
@vastrightwing: Yeah, I really only tried it because I had a specific model I'm looking at and knew it off the top of my head, just to see if it worked. As with most of Ask's offerings, it left me less than impressed.
@biggeek3:
I read an article somewhere that said that somebody purchased ask.com a while back, but an incompetent attorney somewhere did not include the intellectual property known as "Jeeves" in the deal, and so Jeeves was still owned by the previous owner... who wanted a huge sum of money for it ... so the new buyers basically said "Screw it, we don't need no stinkin' Jeeves" and rebranded without it.
completely sucks cant really find anything and 90% of more of the info is inaccurate, what they need is a script that searches on your behalf all of the stores then lists the prices
@pecan 3.14159265: Yeah, back in college, one of my team mates called me a nerd after i did something particularly nerdy while working on the project. And i was like "you know, i take that as a compliment... so you are not discouraging me, if that was your intent".
Not too well. This site doesn't actually comparison shop, it just picks out what sites like FatWallet pick out as deals. So if FatWallet or CheapStingyBargains doesn't highlight it as a sale or a deal, it won't be on the Ask.com site. Even if Barnesandnoble.com or BestBuy.com was cheaper than Amazon for one day, if it didn't get picked up somewhere on the internet as such, it wouldn't be featured.
The first thing I searched for was Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series. One of the hits I got was the Blu-Ray from Amazon for $172.99, but it says at the top "This deal is over 15 days old and may have expired" - sure enough, Amazon says it's $207.99. And lower on Ask.com page results there's a bar with other merchants for comparison and it does reflect the current Amazon price.
I then searched for the Roomba 560, and all three deals were from Newegg, just reported by different sites.
Again, no comparison shopping here. It's only helpful if you think a store may be running a sale of some kind. If it doesn't get picked up somewhere else, it won't get picked up at Ask.com.