Ask.com

Ask Jeeves has abandoned its butler and become Ask.com and now offers some new features. I played around with their mapping feature a little bit and it seems pretty cool. For one thing, you can ask for 'walking' directions rather than just driving directions. I am not sure that this capability is in any other mapping site and is certainly convenient. You can also just pick a point on the map and it calculates the address there. Also, the zooming in/zooming out feature is a sliding scale, rather than the preset 'city,' 'region,' etc... that are on Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps. I guess Google Maps features that too, but I personally hate Google Maps. I find that the directions they give are often horrible. One other thing I liked about Ask.com Maps is that it saves addresses for you along the lefthand side. So, if you want to go from point A to point B to point C but then also want to see how to go from point A to point C directly, this is much easier and viewable all at once.

Ask.com also apparently has a 'search desktop' feature, which apparently is all the rage these days. Google Desktop is a similar feature available. Personally, I don't have the need for this - yet.

The Ask.com toolbox is nice, too, and collapses if so desired. Its quicklink options are useful, in my opinion. Ask.com has, and who would have thought this possible, an even more streamlined and simple interface than Google does.