Ask.com has relaunched its website with a new look and new tools as it hopes to catch up with Google in the search market.

The new search page has been cleaned up and now carries much less advertising, and a new sidebar of search tools allows users to search under specific areas.

The company has also reduced the number of sponsored search results that appear on the page.

"Google was the first to realise that a search site has to be simple to access," Adrian Cox, general manager of Ask.com Europe, told vnunet.com.

"We used to have 10 links, and now it's a maximum of four. We've rebased the business model and believe that the increase in traffic will make up the extra money from lost advertising."

Other notable new features include a binocular preview tool that allows searchers to preview sites simply by moving the cursor over the search result.

The engine can also save the user's search preferences on the corporate server so that more personalised searches can be made from any computer.