Ask.com

Ask.com wants to be your friend SO HARD. I mean, they really, really seem to want recognition as a respectable search engine. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I feel genuinely sorry for Ask.com. All of these improvements and add-ons must have cost some money, and so they've resorted to advertising. I see ads on the internet, television, and I think I even saw a billboard once. Isn't that kind of weird? I did some half-ass searching(on Google), and found that Ask.com is in the top 50 search engines. I guess that's not good enough for the folks over at Ask, but they need to realize that providing nothing more than a search engine with a couple advanced features just doesn't cut it anymore. Google jumped on the bandwagon by adding "gmail", along with other branches like Google video, Picasa(an online photo album), Google Maps, Google Earth, etc.
Their only attraction to me before was when they were AskJeeves.com. I used to use their search engine once in a while, solely for the novelty value of having an imaginary butler do my bidding.

R.I.P. Jeeves

-Also check out the caca story they made up to explain what happened to Jeeves: link.