Ultra-high energy (>100 PeV) neutrinos promise to deliver unique information about the distant universe, as other messengers like cosmic rays and gamma rays are attenuated on the largest (>100 Mpc) scales. The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is a detector under construction at the South Pole designed to measure this flux. It seeks to observe neutrinos by measuring the radio-frequency impulses that are generated when neutrinos interact in ice. Five stations, of the initial proposed 37, have been installed so far. In this talk, we will discuss the construction status of the experiment, including the installation of two new, enhanced stations this last Austral summer. We will present preliminary work that demonstrates the feasibility of reducing analysis thresholds by constraining searches to the direction of the neutrinos producing the radio emission. This ability to search on both time and direction would represent a new search strategy for ARA. We will briefly discuss how this may be applied to search for afterglow neutrinos from gamma ray bursts.