Ask.com

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Ask.com
Type	Search Engine
Founded	1996
Headquarters	Oakland, California, USA
Key people	Garrett Gruener David Warthen (Founders) Jim Safka (CEO) Scott Garrell (President)
Industry	Internet
Revenue	▲ $227 Million
Parent	InterActive Corp.
Website	Ask.com For other countries, see International.

Ask.com is a search engine. It is a business division of IAC Search & Media, and was founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.^[1].

Contents 1 History 2 International 3 Corporate details 4 Marketing and promotion 4.1 Evolution of logos 4.2 Information-revolution.org campaign 4.3 Television advertising 5 Toolbar 6 References 7 External links

[edit] History

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal 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. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching.

On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character was disassociated with Ask.com.

Ask.com owns a variety of sites 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. As of June 5, 2007 the site relaunched with a new, more simplistic look.^[2]

In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature^[3], allowing users to opt-out from tracking of search queries and IP and cookie values. They also vowed to erase this data after 18 months if the AskEraser option is not set. The Center for Democracy and Technology's positive evaluation of AskEraser^[4] differed from that of privacy groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center who found problems such as the requirement that HTTP cookies be enabled for AskEraser to function.^[5]

[edit] International

The company also operates localized services in UK (Ask.com UK), Germany (Ask.com Deutschland), Spain (Ask.com España), Italy (Ask.com Italia), the Netherlands (Ask.com Nederland) and Japan (Ask.jp).

[edit] Corporate details

Ask Jeeves, Inc. stock traded on the 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 Jeeves stock soared more than 500% throughout the course of the year. In July 2005, the ASKJ ticker was retired upon the closing of the acquisition by IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC/InterActiveCorp trades on the 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.

[edit] Marketing and promotion

[edit] Evolution of logos

Ask Jeeves in 1996	Ask Jeeves in 2000	Ask Jeeves in 2001	Ask Jeeves in 2004
Ask.com after Jeeves	Ask.com in 2007

[edit] Information-revolution.org campaign

In early 2007, a number of advertisements appeared on London Underground trains warning commuters that 75% of all the information on the web flowed through one site (implied to be Google), with a URL for www.information-revolution.org. Links also appeared on the homepage of Ask.com and in videos on YouTube. Both the adverts and website were designed in shades of red, white and black associated with anarchist movements. The website was intended to foster debate about the use of search engines, with messages such as "One source isn’t choice". However, when web users found out that the site was actually a form of astroturfing by the marketing company Profero, the blogging arena became overwhelmed with negative messages berating Ask.com for their cynical attempt at marketing. Several users noticed the fact that for a short period, doing a search on Ask for "google" would return the information-revolution site as the first result.^[6]

[edit] Television advertising

Apostolos Gerasoulis, the co-creator of Ask's Teoma algorithmic search technology, starred in four television advertisements in 2007, extolling the virtues of Ask.com's usefulness for information relevance.^[7] Furthermore, there was a Jeeves balloon in the Macy Thanksgiving Parade years ago.

[edit] Toolbar

The Ask.com toolbar is a free toolbar from Ask.com. It is available for both the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers.

Features include desktop and e-mail searching, weather forecasts, stock portfolios, and a zooming feature which increases the size of any webpage. The site itself has been listed as malware by several anti-spyware providers and its toolbars are the subject of much controversy, enabling its advertising partners to take advantage of known Windows exploits to self-install advertising-delivery programs without the computer user's knowledge or consent, some of which are confirmed spyware.^[8]

Although the company insists that Ask.com does not tolerate spyware and blames its partners (and assures that such relationships will be terminated), its site and toolbars have been blacklisted by some IT security firms and university network administrators, as well as many anti-spyware providers such as Spybot, McAfee, TrendMicro, and others.^[9]

^[10]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Ask.com
• Ask.com toolbar