{"id":548,"date":"2008-05-04T20:40:47","date_gmt":"2008-05-05T03:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=548"},"modified":"2008-05-05T21:51:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-06T04:51:00","slug":"does-askmenow-have-all-the-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/548\/","title":{"rendered":"Does AskMeNow &#8220;have all the answers&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/AskMeNow.png\" alt=\"AskMeNow Homepage\" width=\"184\" height=\"412\" \/><em>AskMeNow<\/em> is a mobile search service that claims to &#8220;have all the answers&#8221; An impossible claim of course, but the site is actually pretty useful for looking up a variety of things like Wikipedia entries, stock quotes, driving directions or sports scores.<\/p>\n<p>The site  is a search portal with a homepage of links to  news, sports, finance, entertainment, etc.  sections and a Wikipedia search box.  Each section has  items relevant to the its topic from around the web. Most sections also have a search box or two offering specific types of searches related to the section&#8217;s topic. For example, the  finance section (<a title=\"mobile site\" href=\"http:\/\/money.askmenow.com\">money.askmenow.com<\/a>) has about 10 financial news items from Reuters and a ticker search that returns stock quotes and company specific financial wire items. The entertainment section has a word of the day, joke of the day, a biography of someone born today  and offers horosope and movie show time searches.<\/p>\n<p>I like AskMeKnow&#8217;s approach to search. Minimizing data entry is probably the single most important element of mobile usability. Forcing the user to first chose a topic area and then either pick from a list of items or enter a tailored search tends to give relevant results with a minimum of key presses.<\/p>\n<p>AskMeNow does some content adaptation, images are resized based on screen size, but long news items are not paginated  making them unusable on some feature  phones without full-web browsers, like the still popular RAZR. Currently, one of the stories in the NASCAR section consists of a single page with 45 KB of preformated text, far too large for many phones. And because it is preformatted and contains a wide table, the page requires extensive horizontal scrolling to read, even in a full-web browser like Opera Mini.<\/p>\n<p><em>Mobile link<\/em>: <a title=\"mobile site\" href=\"http:\/\/m.askmenow.com\">m.askmenow.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Ratings<\/em>: Content: <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"_\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/blue-starOL.gif\" alt=\"_\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/> Usability: <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-red-star.gif\" alt=\"X\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-red-star.gif\" alt=\"X\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sm-red-star.gif\" alt=\"X\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"_\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/red-starOL.gif\" alt=\"_\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"_\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/red-starOL.gif\" alt=\"_\" width=\"15\" height=\"13\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>Related<\/em>: <a href=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/index.php?id=17\">WapReview Mobile Directory &#8211; Web-WAP Search<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AskMeNow is a mobile search service that claims to &#8220;have all the answers&#8221; An impossible claim of course, but the site is actually pretty useful for looking up a variety of things like Wikipedia entries, stock quotes, driving directions or sports scores. The site is a search portal with a homepage of links to news, sports, finance, entertainment, etc. sections and a Wikipedia search box. Each section has items relevant to the its topic from around the web. Most sections &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/548\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}