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Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, is an Internet search engine, or the company named "Ask.com" as a 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 the company 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 its properties places Ask.com in the top ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004.

Ask Jeeves history

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 initally flooded Google Search, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search and buried significant webpages that Ask Jeeves (or Ask.com) could still find.

Jeeves' retirement

On 23 September 2005 the company announced plans to phase out the character ^[1], and on 27 February 2006 Jeeves was disassociated with Ask.com. A competition was run on Ask for Kids as to what Jeeves should do when he retires. The winner was World Cruises.

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. 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^[2].

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.

See also

• List of search engines

Major competitors

• Google Search
• Yahoo! Search
• MSN Search

References

1. ↑  23 September 2005. "Ask Jeeves decides to axe Jeeves" at BBC News. Accessed 23 September 2005.
2. ↑  10 February 2006. "Search site retires iconic Jeeves" at BBC News. Accessed 11 February 2006.
3. ↑  26 February 2006. "Another Brand Retirement of Note: Teoma" at the Ask.com Blog. Accessed 27 February 2006.

External links

• Ask.com
• AskForKids.com
• Ask.com Archive
• Ask.com Help Page
• The Official Ask.com Weblog
• Jeeves retirement page
• Ask.com Desktop Search
• Save Jeeves blog
• Ask.com Toolbar
• Satirewire parody of Ask Jeeves