Search Firms - Other

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A few months ago at SemTech 2009 we announced that our questions and answers database –launched almost a year ago – had grown to more than 300 million high-quality Q&A pairs. “High-quality” means that we use our semantic and extraction capabilities to recognize the best answer from within the sea of information on relevant pages. Instead of 10 blue links, we deliver the best answer right at the top of the page.

This week we’ve achieved another significant milestone by reaching 400 million Q&A pairs, and I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of our engineering and product teams who have built one of the largest and most useful Q&A collections on the web.

I also want to share what we’re seeing from our users in response to our Q&A offerings, and to preview what’s next for Ask.

Our Q&A strategy has started to pay off. We see increasing loyalty among users who conduct question searches on Ask. Simultaneously, we’ve seen a pronounced increase in the percentage of users on Ask who conduct queries in the form of a question – we now see 3x more questions on our site as a share of total queries than our competitors. And perhaps most rewarding for us is when we ask Internet users where they go for questions and answers online, they consistently rank Ask.com first, making us the #1 brand for questions and answers online.

Online search in the form of natural-language questions was the ingenious proposition of the original Ask Jeeves in 1996, and frankly, it’s the reason we’re still around today after so many other Internet brands didn’t survive. 

As the leader in questions for more than a decade, one thing is crystal clear: Asking a question isn’t the same as searching.

Our users tell us that their expectation when asking a question is different from their expectation when conducting a search. When asking a question, they have a specific need for a specific piece of information. When conducting a search, they’re browsing for information, sorting through results to unearth the answer they’re looking for. 

Put another way, when asking a question, you expect the work to be done for you (much like when you ask a librarian for a book at the library). When conducting a search, you do the work yourself (skipping the librarian, and heading to the card catalog instead).

Further, with the advent of the social web, asking questions online is now more natural, as we have the ability to broadcast a question to real people, our friends, instead of hoping a computer can understand our inquiry.

I firmly believe that questions are the future of search, but search technologies as we know them today can’t deliver against this future.

And this brings me to what’s next for Ask.

We’re focused on solving the two shortcomings of search as it relates to questions:

1. Traditional search signals don’t work well for answers to questions.
2. The answers to many questions are wrong or don’t exist online.

Let me explain what I mean.

When you’re in the business of answering questions, the volume of inbound links to a given web page – a long-accepted search technique for ranking web sites – doesn’t tell you the site with the best answer to a user’s question; it just tells you the most popular page with relevant information. Nor does another search technique, text matching, sufficiently identify the best answer, as the text in a question is rarely found in the best answer. Same with a newer though established technique, pioneered at Ask, actually, that uses click-through behavior to determine a site's relevance. Unlike presenting a text snippet that merely describes a site and a link, presenting the actual answer requires no click through to the  
destination site.

Below are some examples which bring this to life.
 
 
 
Without a wholly different approach, search engines will never be able to adequately answer all the questions that users increasingly have for them.

More importantly, no method that merely extracts answers from a published web page will ever be able to access the limitless number of answers that are unpublished on the Internet. Indeed, the information that is directly relevant to many questions most certainly exists; it's just that it’s locked in people’s heads or captured in unpublished conversations, and therefore inaccessible by traditional search. Obviously, this is not a trivial deficiency in a world that is increasingly interconnected and clamoring for perspective, guidance, and shared knowledge at an interpersonal level online.
 
At Ask.com, we’re dedicating ourselves to solving these problems and we're approaching the solution in two primary ways: 

1.  Extracting and ranking existing answers
2. Indexing sources of answers that have not yet been published

To extract and rank existing answers, as opposed to merely ranking web pages that contain information, we have and are continuing to develop a unique set of algorithms and technologies that are based on new signals for relevance specifically tuned to questions and answers.

I’ve outlined a few of these below.

    

 
 
Developing a new Q&A relevance algorithm that draws upon these signals is what we’re focused on building here at Ask, honing our ability to extract answers from the published Internet, and allowing us to fulfill a vastly larger volume of questions than can be done with existing search technologies.

But our work doesn’t end with extraction and ranking of existing, published answers. Where our vision really comes to life is in our efforts to index the sources of unpublished knowledge that can generate answers specifically in response to a question, in the moment it’s asked. This is the long tail of questions that are nearly impossible for search engines to answer, but which create incredible value for users when they are.

Here are some examples:

 

As we accelerate our strategy to answer the world’s questions, these “tough questions” are where we see huge opportunity, and where we are also focusing our efforts. And as you’ve probably guessed by now, we will do this unconventionally, harnessing the equity of the Ask brand, and our loyal, question-loving users to build a community of answerers available through Ask.

We’ve learned at Ask that while the existing Web can solve many problems, when you’re in the pursuit of answering questions, relying on published information sources can really only get you part of the way there. There is an infinite volume of answers in people’s heads that isn’t being indexed by the search engines today, and that can’t be successfully deployed against questions until you unleash it, in real-time, in response to the unique needs expressed by the person asking the question. 

This is the problem we’re in the process of solving here at Ask: Connecting our users’ questions to the best possible answers on the planet – be they published or unpublished. And as we solve this problem, we believe today’s multi-billion dollar questions and answers value proposition will one day transcend search as we know it today.

I’m very passionate about this, and so is our team at Ask.com. You’ll be hearing much more from us on this in the coming months.

Doug

Doug Leeds
President
Ask.com US

A few months ago at SemTech 2009 we announced that our questions and answers database –launched almost a year ago – had grown to more than 300 million high-quality Q&A pairs. “High-quality” means that we use our semantic and extraction capabilities to recognize the best answer from within the sea of information on relevant pages. Instead of 10 blue links, we deliver the best answer right at the top of the page.

This week we’ve achieved another significant milestone by reaching 400 million Q&A pairs, and I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of our engineering and product teams who have built one of the largest and most useful Q&A collections on the web.

I also want to share what we’re seeing from our users in response to our Q&A offerings, and to preview what’s next for Ask.

Our Q&A strategy has started to pay off. We see increasing loyalty among users who conduct question searches on Ask. Simultaneously, we’ve seen a pronounced increase in the percentage of users on Ask who conduct queries in the form of a question – we now see 3x more questions on our site as a share of total queries than our competitors. And perhaps most rewarding for us is when we ask Internet users where they go for questions and answers online, they consistently rank Ask.com first, making us the #1 brand for questions and answers online.

Online search in the form of natural-language questions was the ingenious proposition of the original Ask Jeeves in 1996, and frankly, it’s the reason we’re still around today after so many other Internet brands didn’t survive. 

As the leader in questions for more than a decade, one thing is crystal clear: Asking a question isn’t the same as searching.

Our users tell us that their expectation when asking a question is different from their expectation when conducting a search. When asking a question, they have a specific need for a specific piece of information. When conducting a search, they’re browsing for information, sorting through results to unearth the answer they’re looking for. 

Put another way, when asking a question, you expect the work to be done for you (much like when you ask a librarian for a book at the library). When conducting a search, you do the work yourself (skipping the librarian, and heading to the card catalog instead).

Further, with the advent of the social web, asking questions online is now more natural, as we have the ability to broadcast a question to real people, our friends, instead of hoping a computer can understand our inquiry.

I firmly believe that questions are the future of search, but search technologies as we know them today can’t deliver against this future.

And this brings me to what’s next for Ask.

We’re focused on solving the two shortcomings of search as it relates to questions:

1. Traditional search signals don’t work well for answers to questions.
2. The answers to many questions are wrong or don’t exist online.

Let me explain what I mean.

When you’re in the business of answering questions, the volume of inbound links to a given web page – a long-accepted search technique for ranking web sites – doesn’t tell you the site with the best answer to a user’s question; it just tells you the most popular page with relevant information. Nor does another search technique, text matching, sufficiently identify the best answer, as the text in a question is rarely found in the best answer. Same with a newer though established technique, pioneered at Ask, actually, that uses click-through behavior to determine a site's relevance. Unlike presenting a text snippet that merely describes a site and a link, presenting the actual answer requires no click through to the  
destination site.

Below are some examples which bring this to life.
 
 
 
Without a wholly different approach, search engines will never be able to adequately answer all the questions that users increasingly have for them.

More importantly, no method that merely extracts answers from a published web page will ever be able to access the limitless number of answers that are unpublished on the Internet. Indeed, the information that is directly relevant to many questions most certainly exists; it's just that it’s locked in people’s heads or captured in unpublished conversations, and therefore inaccessible by traditional search. Obviously, this is not a trivial deficiency in a world that is increasingly interconnected and clamoring for perspective, guidance, and shared knowledge at an interpersonal level online.
 
At Ask.com, we’re dedicating ourselves to solving these problems and we're approaching the solution in two primary ways: 

1.  Extracting and ranking existing answers
2. Indexing sources of answers that have not yet been published

To extract and rank existing answers, as opposed to merely ranking web pages that contain information, we have and are continuing to develop a unique set of algorithms and technologies that are based on new signals for relevance specifically tuned to questions and answers.

I’ve outlined a few of these below.

    

 
 
Developing a new Q&A relevance algorithm that draws upon these signals is what we’re focused on building here at Ask, honing our ability to extract answers from the published Internet, and allowing us to fulfill a vastly larger volume of questions than can be done with existing search technologies.

But our work doesn’t end with extraction and ranking of existing, published answers. Where our vision really comes to life is in our efforts to index the sources of unpublished knowledge that can generate answers specifically in response to a question, in the moment it’s asked. This is the long tail of questions that are nearly impossible for search engines to answer, but which create incredible value for users when they are.

Here are some examples:

 

As we accelerate our strategy to answer the world’s questions, these “tough questions” are where we see huge opportunity, and where we are also focusing our efforts. And as you’ve probably guessed by now, we will do this unconventionally, harnessing the equity of the Ask brand, and our loyal, question-loving users to build a community of answerers available through Ask.

We’ve learned at Ask that while the existing Web can solve many problems, when you’re in the pursuit of answering questions, relying on published information sources can really only get you part of the way there. There is an infinite volume of answers in people’s heads that isn’t being indexed by the search engines today, and that can’t be successfully deployed against questions until you unleash it, in real-time, in response to the unique needs expressed by the person asking the question. 

This is the problem we’re in the process of solving here at Ask: Connecting our users’ questions to the best possible answers on the planet – be they published or unpublished. And as we solve this problem, we believe today’s multi-billion dollar questions and answers value proposition will one day transcend search as we know it today.

I’m very passionate about this, and so is our team at Ask.com. You’ll be hearing much more from us on this in the coming months.

Doug

Doug Leeds
President
Ask.com US

We know the economy has been down, and that’s getting folks a little ‘down’ about finding savings in these tough times.
 
Well, with Ask Deals, we’re convinced you’ll soon be celebrating, and getting ‘down’ in a different way…

What do online shoppers do when they nail a good deal online at Ask Deals?

Why they dance, of course!
 
That’s the message behind a new round of Ask advertisements hitting the airwaves, and we’re excited to share some of them below.
 
Today, what we’re most excited about is our new Ask Deals ‘microsite’ that features an interactive version of the jingle you hear in the TV spots – allowing our Ask customers to share and join in the celebration of saving money:

 

How does it work?  Just go to the Ask Deals microsite and enter the name of an item in the Ask Deals search box, and then use your webcam to record yourself dancing and singing along to the Ask Deals catchy tune.

When you’re done, share the experience with your friends on Facebook. When you submit your video to the microsite, a link will be posted after you sign into Facebook to your News Feed. The posts will link your friends back to the Ask Deals microsite, so they can watch your video and create their own:

 

Voila! A savings star is born!

But don’t just take our word (or their word!) for it. Check out Ask Deals, conduct a search for what you’re shopping for, and you’ll see why we’re encouraging everyone to ‘Ask’ before they shop.  With Ask Deals, you get the best deals from all over the internet, all in one place.
 
With Halloween, ‘Black Friday’, and the holiday season all coming up – now is the perfect time to save early, and often! 

 
Click here to view the new Ask Deals advertisements

 - Jared Cluff, SVP of Marketing, Ask.com
 
P.S. – A ‘tip o’ the hat’ to the folks at Agency.com in San Francisco (a unit of Omnicom) for being a great ‘dance’ partner…

We know the economy has been down, and that’s getting folks a little ‘down’ about finding savings in these tough times.
 
Well, with Ask Deals, we’re convinced you’ll soon be celebrating, and getting ‘down’ in a different way…

What do online shoppers do when they nail a good deal online at Ask Deals?

Why they dance, of course!
 
That’s the message behind a new round of Ask advertisements hitting the airwaves, and we’re excited to share some of them below.
 
Today, what we’re most excited about is our new Ask Deals ‘microsite’ that features an interactive version of the jingle you hear in the TV spots – allowing our Ask customers to share and join in the celebration of saving money:

 

How does it work?  Just go to the Ask Deals microsite and enter the name of an item in the Ask Deals search box, and then use your webcam to record yourself dancing and singing along to the Ask Deals catchy tune.

When you’re done, share the experience with your friends on Facebook. When you submit your video to the microsite, a link will be posted after you sign into Facebook to your News Feed. The posts will link your friends back to the Ask Deals microsite, so they can watch your video and create their own:

 

Voila! A savings star is born!

But don’t just take our word (or their word!) for it. Check out Ask Deals, conduct a search for what you’re shopping for, and you’ll see why we’re encouraging everyone to ‘Ask’ before they shop.  With Ask Deals, you get the best deals from all over the internet, all in one place.
 
With Halloween, ‘Black Friday’, and the holiday season all coming up – now is the perfect time to save early, and often! 

 
Click here to view the new Ask Deals advertisements

 - Jared Cluff, SVP of Marketing, Ask.com
 
P.S. – A ‘tip o’ the hat’ to the folks at Agency.com in San Francisco (a unit of Omnicom) for being a great ‘dance’ partner…

It’s been six months since we launched our iPhone app and three million+ downloads later, we’re excited to take the next major step towards offering our unique experience to even more Smartphone users. With our new application for BlackBerry® we are expanding Dictionary.com's addressable market to a potential 65 percent of U.S.* smartphone users.

Our pocket English dictionary and thesaurus application is the only free dictionary and thesaurus app currently available for BlackBerry® smartphones. The app was designed to meet the specific professional needs of Blackberry®  smartphone users, so several of the features help them get essential information and answers on the go. 

In addition to providing users with more than 500,000 words, definitions and synonyms, the app features audio pronunciations, spelling suggestions, recent history and Dictionary.com’s popular Word of the Day for both English and Spanish. 

 

The new app also allows users to instantly access a definition or synonym while reading or drafting an email, a feature unique to the Dictionary.com experience on BlackBerry smartphones. You can also email or SMS text any word and its definition to yourself or others right from the app.

Check it out and let us know what you think! The app is available now on BlackBerry App World™ (www.blackberry.com/appworld) and http://dictionary.com/apps/blackberry.  A link to the app can be immediately delivered to your BlackBerry smartphone by texting BBAPP to 44636.  The app is currently available for the BlackBerry® Pearl™, BlackBerry® Curve™ and BlackBerry® 8800 series of smartphones, as well as the BlackBerry® Bold™ and BlackBerry® Tour™ smartphones.  If you have a BlackBerry Smartphone model that is  not yet supported, you can still access Dictionary.com through our mobile website at http://m.dictionary.com.

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy!

 – The Dictionary.com Team

*Source: m:metrics, three months ending August 2009 (42% RIM, 23% Apple)

It’s been six months since we launched our iPhone app and three million+ downloads later, we’re excited to take the next major step towards offering our unique experience to even more Smartphone users. With our new application for BlackBerry® we are expanding Dictionary.com's addressable market to a potential 65 percent of U.S.* smartphone users.

Our pocket English dictionary and thesaurus application is the only free dictionary and thesaurus app currently available for BlackBerry® smartphones. The app was designed to meet the specific professional needs of Blackberry®  smartphone users, so several of the features help them get essential information and answers on the go. 

In addition to providing users with more than 500,000 words, definitions and synonyms, the app features audio pronunciations, spelling suggestions, recent history and Dictionary.com’s popular Word of the Day for both English and Spanish. 

 

The new app also allows users to instantly access a definition or synonym while reading or drafting an email, a feature unique to the Dictionary.com experience on BlackBerry smartphones. You can also email or SMS text any word and its definition to yourself or others right from the app.

Check it out and let us know what you think! The app is available now on BlackBerry App World™ (www.blackberry.com/appworld) and http://dictionary.com/apps/blackberry.  A link to the app can be immediately delivered to your BlackBerry smartphone by texting BBAPP to 44636.  The app is currently available for the BlackBerry® Pearl™, BlackBerry® Curve™ and BlackBerry® 8800 series of smartphones, as well as the BlackBerry® Bold™ and BlackBerry® Tour™ smartphones.  If you have a BlackBerry Smartphone model that is  not yet supported, you can still access Dictionary.com through our mobile website at http://m.dictionary.com.

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy!

 – The Dictionary.com Team

*Source: m:metrics, three months ending August 2009 (42% RIM, 23% Apple)

 

Consider this: a tough economy with new, record job losses. Families gathered around kitchen tables with a pencil and calculator trying to make ends meet – every week.  The fact that ‘coupons’ was the sixth most searched for term on Ask in 2008 – and that the number of queries for value-related terms shot up almost 50% so far in 2009.

And, according to comScore, nearly 60% of consumers now cite they are using coupons more often to reduce their shopping expenses – with more than half of them getting coupons from online services.

It’s a perfect recipe for a unique and timely offering like Ask Deals, which we’ve launched today on Ask.com.

To meet the need of our users – and help lift a burden – we’ve developed Ask Deals as a robust, comprehensive and user-friendly way to get coupons and deals of all kinds on the Web for this upcoming shopping season.

Ask Deals cuts through the clutter of invalid, expired, and low-value offers with a database of more than 1 million high-quality, usable offers – refreshed and updated multiple times a day

Ask Deals does many things at once:

--It serves-up all the Web’s best deals in one place. It aggregates high-quality and best-savings offers on the web for hundreds of product categories
--It injects and blends deals right into your search experience, unlike other search engines
--Using Ask’s award-winning Zoom Related Search, it gives consumers additional great discounts on the right panel, next to core search results
--It allows searchers to immediately share the savings they find with family and friends via email, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter
--By choosing the Ask Deals homepage skin, you’ll also get compelling and timely savings offers, hand-picked by the Ask Deals editorial team, right on their search homepage…and, you can also sign up for our new “Deal of the Day” email.

Here's a look at the cool social media sharing feature in AskDeals:

 

  
Building on Ask’s legacy of innovation and cutting-edge technologies, Ask Deals uses proprietary “Deal Detector” technology to sift through the tens of millions of promotions, store circulars, and top online coupons & deals sites to give you one-click savings. By crawling message boards, user-generated content and blogs, we’ll find the popular savings that are moving among users at any given moment.

Ask Deals is the only search engine that actually integrates, blends and injects them right into your search results – saving you time from clicking through endless links by providing the best deals, the first time every time, front-and-center at the top of the page.

Here is the walkthrough of some of the features for this product release.

When the user intent is explicit about coupon and deals query we will blend results using our proprietary Smart Answers technology. Here's an example of a “cheap Halloween costumes” query - we show it as the #1 result on the search page.

 

When the user intent is less direct, we'll inject the results in lower ordinal and give suggested links from our Deals Channel.  Here's another example: for the query “sears”, we show the Deals Channel link on the top, and the coupon and deal unit in lower ordinal.

 

 

In order to further help users, we use our proprietary Zoom Related Search technology to give query suggestions. Below, see an example for the query “printable coupon", where we give Money Saving Searches for related queries on the top right panel.

We hope you enjoy Ask Deals – just in time for the shopping season at the end of a tough 2009.  We’re excited about this special, seasonal vertical that will be available through the end of the year, and perhaps beyond, if our users love it. We think they will, and we look forward to your feedback.

Thanks for reading – and ‘asking’ for savings! We’re happy to deliver.

- Ankur Choksi,
Director of Search Technology, Ask.com

 

Consider this: a tough economy with new, record job losses. Families gathered around kitchen tables with a pencil and calculator trying to make ends meet – every week.  The fact that ‘coupons’ was the sixth most searched for term on Ask in 2008 – and that the number of queries for value-related terms shot up almost 50% so far in 2009.

And, according to comScore, nearly 60% of consumers now cite they are using coupons more often to reduce their shopping expenses – with more than half of them getting coupons from online services.

It’s a perfect recipe for a unique and timely offering like Ask Deals, which we’ve launched today on Ask.com.

To meet the need of our users – and help lift a burden – we’ve developed Ask Deals as a robust, comprehensive and user-friendly way to get coupons and deals of all kinds on the Web for this upcoming shopping season.

Ask Deals cuts through the clutter of invalid, expired, and low-value offers with a database of more than 1 million high-quality, usable offers – refreshed and updated multiple times a day

Ask Deals does many things at once:

--It serves-up all the Web’s best deals in one place. It aggregates high-quality and best-savings offers on the web for hundreds of product categories
--It injects and blends deals right into your search experience, unlike other search engines
--Using Ask’s award-winning Zoom Related Search, it gives consumers additional great discounts on the right panel, next to core search results
--It allows searchers to immediately share the savings they find with family and friends via email, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter
--By choosing the Ask Deals homepage skin, you’ll also get compelling and timely savings offers, hand-picked by the Ask Deals editorial team, right on their search homepage…and, you can also sign up for our new “Deal of the Day” email.

Here's a look at the cool social media sharing feature in AskDeals:

 

  
Building on Ask’s legacy of innovation and cutting-edge technologies, Ask Deals uses proprietary “Deal Detector” technology to sift through the tens of millions of promotions, store circulars, and top online coupons & deals sites to give you one-click savings. By crawling message boards, user-generated content and blogs, we’ll find the popular savings that are moving among users at any given moment.

Ask Deals is the only search engine that actually integrates, blends and injects them right into your search results – saving you time from clicking through endless links by providing the best deals, the first time every time, front-and-center at the top of the page.

Here is the walkthrough of some of the features for this product release.

When the user intent is explicit about coupon and deals query we will blend results using our proprietary Smart Answers technology. Here's an example of a “cheap Halloween costumes” query - we show it as the #1 result on the search page.

 

When the user intent is less direct, we'll inject the results in lower ordinal and give suggested links from our Deals Channel.  Here's another example: for the query “sears”, we show the Deals Channel link on the top, and the coupon and deal unit in lower ordinal.

 

 

In order to further help users, we use our proprietary Zoom Related Search technology to give query suggestions. Below, see an example for the query “printable coupon", where we give Money Saving Searches for related queries on the top right panel.

We hope you enjoy Ask Deals – just in time for the shopping season at the end of a tough 2009.  We’re excited about this special, seasonal vertical that will be available through the end of the year, and perhaps beyond, if our users love it. We think they will, and we look forward to your feedback.

Thanks for reading – and ‘asking’ for savings! We’re happy to deliver.

- Ankur Choksi,
Director of Search Technology, Ask.com

Two years ago, Richard Jalichandra came on board as CEO of Technorati. During that time, he's refrained from talking too much about our overall strategy. We’ve announced site re-designs, acquisitions and the launch of our ad network, Technorati Media, but we haven't said as much about the company, particularly in replying to criticism. But in the next few weeks, we have some big changes coming that will affect bloggers, so we want to give everyone a heads-up.  In addition to the upcoming 2009 State-of-the-Blogosphere, technorati.com will be receiving a complete overhaul.

For the first time, we've talked openly and in detail about the changes that are coming and our plans for the future. The article went live this morning on VentureBeat.

Richard Jalichandra's guest post goes into even more detail about the relative silence, the challenges we were facing, our strategy over the last year, why we've needed to make the changes we've made. There's A LOT here we haven't spoken about publicly before now.

Technorati.com was founded to help people find great blog content - we're rebuilding from the ground up to do this so that we can deliver the most reliable, most relevant community of self-expression and content discovery.