Search engine Ask.com added data feeds from analytics vendor Compete to expand the view of a website via the Ask Binoculars feature.

In the search result pages at Ask, a binocular icon appears alongside many of the listings. A simple mouseover of the icon, representative of the Binoculars feature, brings up a preview of the destination site.

A new tab for Statistics accompanies the Preview now, itself moved to a tab in the preview window. The Ask.com blog explained about the update:

Knowing how popular a site is, for example, can give an idea of its influence and trustworthiness or it may be helpful in various types of research. Turns out Binoculars is the perfect tool for this kind of information. It keeps the result page uncluttered for the casual searcher, yet provides deeper insight for those who need it.

So we arranged a feed from Compete.com to enhance our Binoculars system.

Compete is doing a great job pulling together data from various sources to compile ongoing web statistics for a huge number of websites. For the inquiring minds among you, this data is now available directly on our search results.

Compete has gained popularity for its site analytics, offered freely to visitors to compare up to three websites. In some ways it has supplanted the venerable Alexa rankings, long considered to be weighted toward the opinions of webmasters and search industry pros.

It provides a nice add-on to Ask Binoculars, and falls within the company’s long-time goal of putting information at people’s fingertips.