Ask.com has announced on their blog that they are launching a new Ask.com which focuses on questions and answers much like it did in the 90s.
The beta test was launched yesterday (26th July) and users can only test it via an invite only (which you can ask for here). According to the Ask blog the new Ask.com will combine their “proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the Web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques”.
In an ironic twist Ask.com say that that the ‘future starts now’ in regards to the new Ask.com when it appears that they have come full circle are going down the route of its Ask Jeeves days.
First launched in 1996 the original Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves as it were) allowed users to get answers to questions using natural everyday language. Ask returned questions to users via a database of question templates which had been matched together by human editors. These question templates were then matched to the users question to return them a set of related sites. However in 2005 Ask gave the boot to Jeeves to become more of your conventional search engine.
Ask state the new move comes due to the ‘explosion of social web’ and that ‘the new Ask.com is designed to fill some major holes left by search engines through a blend of technology and the strongest asset we have – our users”.
I think this is a smart move by Ask.com, they already have the technology to go down this route and social search is going is certainly the way forward so all the pieces fit. However this announcement doesn’t blow me away. Without testing it is hard to fully judge but in this day and age of Google and Bing and even Twitter and Facebook it is hard to get excited about anything Ask has to offer. Maybe it is just me just me but even though Ask are talking about the future it still has that feeling of being very much stuck in the past…
July 28th, 2010 at 9:49 am
Ask Jeeves was a search engine that could answer questions that was the whole point or there motto, it would only make sense that they go back to there conventional ways, They’ve re-branded and named themselves Ask, it looks like a new start, lets hope its a positive one and one that can compete with the major players in the game.