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| Ask.com |
|
| Type |
Search Engine |
| Founded |
1996 |
| Headquarters |
Oakland, California, USA |
| Key people |
Garrett Gruener, David Warthen, Founders. Skip Battle, current CEO |
| Industry |
Internet question site |
| Website |
Ask.com |
Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, is an Internet search engine. It is also the company name of the division of IAC Search & Media, founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. The RODA Group, a venture capital firm, was an early investor. Rob Wrubel joined the company as CEO in 1998 and led it until late 2001, when he was replaced by Skip Battle.
Ask.com owns a variety of popular web destinations including country-specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask For Kids, Teoma (now defunct), Excite, MyWay.com, iWon.com, Bloglines and several others. The combined traffic to these web sites places Ask.com in the top ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004.
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Contents
- 1 Ask Jeeves history
- 1.1 Evolution of Jeeves
- 1.2 Jeeves' retirement
- 2 Technology and concepts
- 3 Corporate details
- 4 See also
- 5 References
- 6 External links
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Ask Jeeves history
"Ask Jeeves" logo formerly used by Ask.com
The mascot for Ask Jeeves (retired as of February 2006)
Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's gentleman", or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorenson), fetching answers to any question asked. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. As time wore on and keyword search engines such as Google rose to prominence, indexing more webpages, Ask Jeeves suffered a loss of many of its users. The technology was reworked to allow keyword searches as well, but by this time Ask Jeeves had dropped below Google, MSN, and Yahoo! in the size of their userbase. However, because Ask.com was slow to index some new webpages, Ask.com did not suffer the onslaught of computer-generated linkspam results that initially flooded Google Search, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search and buried significant webpages that Ask Jeeves (or Ask.com) could still find.
Evolution of Jeeves
Over the years, the "Ask Jeeves" logo has changed considerably:
Jeeves' retirement
On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out the character,[1] and on 27 February 2006 Jeeves was disassociated with Ask.com. A page on the site was created, called "Where's Jeeves?", in which the makers of Ask for Kids announced that Jeeves was retiring:[2]
| “ |
"After ten years of dutifully helping kids answer questions for their homework, learn more about their world, or to just be able help them answer the eternal "Why?" Jeeves has decided that his work here is done. Don't worry. Our site will still be here to help you with all of your homework and searches. Jeeves is just taking this opportunity to hang up his butler suit and retire, but he is taking a few days rest before he goes." |
” |
They then listed several activities Jeeves would partake in during his retirement years. For example, Tropical Living:
| “ |
Jeeves has always fancied owning an island! Whether he's hanging around in his own restaurant, or kicking back on a beach chair, he'll always feel relaxed & rewarded. |
” |
The other activities listed were: Growing Grapes, World Cruises, Monkeying Around, and Space Exploration.
Technology and concepts
The original idea behind Ask.com was the ability to answer questions posed in natural language. Ask.com was the first commercial question-answering search engine for the World Wide Web. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching and strives to be more intuitive and user-friendly than other search engines. In other words, when you ask a question, it searches for the answer. Ask Jeeves sold the same technology used on the ask.com site to corporations including Dell, Toshiba, and E*Trade. That part of the business was sold to Kanisa in 2002.
Ask.com-owned Teoma search technology uses subject-specific link popularity to compute "authoritativeness" of a search result. The Teoma technology also incorporates patented click popularity techniques, originally from the DirectHit search engine, which Ask Jeeves acquired in 2000. On 26 February 2006 Teoma was rebranded and redirected to Ask.com.[3]
Ask Jeeves Picture Search has for a long time been powered by Picsearch.
The ExpertRank algorithm provides search results ordered through attempting to identify authoritative websites. As well as link popularity, subject-specific popularity is also considered. Topics (identified as "clusters") are identified using experts on those topics and this information is used to help improve the ordering of returned websites during searches.
Ask.com headquarters in Oakland, CA
Corporate details
Ask.com stock traded on NASDAQ stock exchange from July 1999 to July 2005, under the ticker symbol ASKJ. At the time of the IPO in 1999, ASKJ had the 3rd best first-day performance in history. In 2003, it was the 51st best performing stock out of 3229 companies on the NASDAQ. The price of Ask.com stock soared more than 500% throughout the course of the year. In July 2005, ASKJ ticker was retired upon the closing of the acquisition by IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC/InterActiveCorp trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol IACI. The IAC/InterActiveCorp deal was announced in March 2005 valuing ASKJ at $1.85 billion. IAC/InterActiveCorp is a media holding company founded and run by Barry Diller.
