Ask.com, rolled out a new product today which they claims improves the speed and relevance of search results.

When Ask.com came out with its “ASK 3D” product in June 2007, which  marked the site moved away from the traditional method of showing search results as a long list and instead sorted them into three vertical panels, one of which included photos and other multimedia content related to users’ queries.

Although Ask 3D was well-received, Chief Executive Jim Safka said, it was too slow at downloading visitors’ search results.

“A lot of people tried the site, but they wouldn’t come back,” he said.

Ask’s network of sites, including Dictionary.com,  moved from fifth to fourth in the U.S. online search market in recent months, surpassing Time Warner Inc.’s AOL with 4.8 percent in August.

Ask sped up search result download times by 30 percent by doing several things, Safka said, including using an expedited delivery system from Akamai Technologies Inc. to show results for common Ask searches.

Ask also has increased the number of sites it indexes content from and the amount of material it gets from those sites, Safka said. And Ask has tweaked the algorithm it uses to rank search results.

Beyond these under-the-hood changes, Ask will divide pages into two panels instead of three and add features like “Ask Q&A,” which aims to give users questions and answers related to their search terms.

Safka said tests of the new version of the search engine have yielded positive results, with people coming to the site more and returning more often.