| Type | Search Engine | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1996 | ||
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, US | ||
| Key people | Garrett Gruener David Warthen (Founders) Doug Leeds (CEO) |
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| Industry | Internet | ||
| Revenue | US$227 million | ||
| Parent | InterActiveCorp | ||
| Website | Ask Jeeves | ||
| Alexa rank | 50 (January 2012[update])[1] | ||
| Registration | Optional | ||
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Ask (known as Ask Jeeves in the UK) is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.[2] Ask.com is currently owned by InterActiveCorp under the NASDAQ symbol IACI. In late 2010, facing insurmountable competition from Google, the company outsourced its web search technology to an unspecified third party and returned to its roots as a question and answer site.[3] Doug Leeds was appointed from president to CEO in January 2011.[4]
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Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet, 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 well as traditional keyword searching. The current Ask.com still supports this, with added support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions.
In 2005, the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves. On February 27, 2006, the character disappeared from Ask.com, and was stated to be "going in to retirement." The U.K./Ireland edition of the website, at uk.ask.com, prominently brought the character back in 2009.
InterActiveCorp owns a variety of sites including country-specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask Kids, Teoma (now ExpertRank[5]) and several others (see this page for a complete list). On June 5, 2007 Ask.com relaunched with a 3D look.[6]
On May 16, 2006, Ask implemented a "Binoculars Site Preview" into its search results. On search results pages, the "Binoculars" let searchers capture a sneak peek of the page they could visit with a mouse-over activating screenshot pop-up.[7]
In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature,[8] 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. HTTP cookies must be enabled for AskEraser to function.[9][10]
On July 4, 2008 InterActiveCorp announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.[11][12]
On July 26, 2010, Ask.com released a closed-beta Q&A service. The service was released to the public on July 29, 2010.[13] Ask.com launched its mobile Q&A app for the iPhone in late 2010.[14]
Ask Jeeves, Inc. stock traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange from July 1999 to July 2005, under the ticker symbol ASKJ. In July 2005, the ASKJ ticker was retired upon the acquisition by InterActiveCorp, valuing ASKJ at US$1.85 billion.
Ask Sponsored Listings is the search engine marketing tool offered to advertisers to increase the visibility of their websites (and subsequent businesses, services, and products) by producing more prominent and frequent search engine listing.
The Ask Toolbar has been accused of being malware, spyware, difficult to fully uninstall, installing without permission, and of being intentionally targeted at children.[15][16] The Ask Toolbar is a web-browser Add-on that can appear as an extra bar added to the browser's window and/or menu and which will change the user's browsers settings and search preferences. It is often installed during the process of another installation, possibly without the installing user's consent or knowledge. It is detected as malware by some virus and spyware detection systems.[17] Ask.com has entered into partnerships with some software security vendors, whereby they are paid to distribute the toolbar alongside their software, and they agree not to detect the toolbar software as malware. The Comodo anti-virus software previously detected the Ask toolbar as 'Unclassified Malware@8305287' until a partnership with Ask where the Ask toolbar was distributed and installed alongside Comodo products.[18]
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.[19]
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.[20] There was a Jeeves balloon in the 2001 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On a January 14, 2009, Ask.com became the official sponsor of NASCAR driver Bobby Labonte's No.96 car. Ask would become the official search engine of NASCAR.[21] Ask.com will be the primary sponsor for the No. 96 for 18 of the first 21 races and has rights to increase this to a total of 29 races this season.[22] The Ask.com car debuted in the 2009 Bud Shootout where it failed to finish the race but subsequently has come back strong placing as high as 5th in the March 1, 2009 Shelby 427 race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.[23] Ask.com's foray into NASCAR is the first instance of its venture into what it calls Super Verticals.[24]