Ask.com

History

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, "Jeeves" being the name of a "gentleman's gentleman", or valet, fetching answers to any question asked. The character was based on Bertie Wooster's valet Jeeves, in the fictional works of P. G. Wodehouse. In movies, the Jeeves character was played by Arthur Treacher, the English actor who lent his name to another American franchise, Arthur Treacher's fish and chips.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language, as well as by traditional keyword searching. The current Ask.com still supports this, with support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions.

In 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on 27 February 2006, the character disappeared from Ask.com. He was stated to be "going into retirement." However, the UK/Ireland edition of the website prominently brought the character back in 2009.

IAC 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) and several others. On 5 June 2007, Ask.com relaunched with a 3D look.

On 16 May 2006, Ask implemented a "Binoculars Site Preview" into its search results. On search results pages, the "Binoculars" let searchers have a sneak peek of the page they could visit with a mouse-over activating a pop-up screenshot.

In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature, 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.

On 4 July 2008, InterActiveCorp announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

On 26 July 2010, Ask.com released a closed-beta Q&A service. The service was released to the public on 29 July 2010. Ask.com launched its mobile Q&A app for the iPhone in late 2010.

Ask.com now reaches 100 million global users per month through its website with more than 2 million downloads of its flagship mobile app. The company has also released additional apps spun out of its Q&A experience, including Ask Around in 2011 and PollRoll in 2012.

Search engine shut-down

In 2010, Ask.com abandoned the search industry, with the loss of 130 search engineering jobs, because it could not compete against more popular search engines such as Google. Earlier in the year, Ask had launched a Q&A community for generating answers from real people as opposed to search algorithms then combined this with its question-and–answer repository, utilizing its extensive history of archived query data to search sites that provide answers to questions people have. To avoid a situation in which no answers were available from its own resources, the company outsourced to an unnamed third-party search provider the comprehensive web search matches that it had gathered itself.

Ask Sponsored Listings

Formerly the direct sales engine for Ask.com, Ask Sponsored Listings is no longer available, having merged with Sendori, an operating business of IAC, in 2011.

Corporate details

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 IAC, valuing at US$1.85 billion.

In 2012 Ask.com made two acquisitions as part of a larger strategy to offer more content on the Ask.com website. On 2 July 2012, Ask.com purchased content discovery start-up, nRelate, for an undisclosed amount. That was followed by the company's acquisition of expert advice and information site About.com, which closed in September 2012.

On 14 August 2014, Ask.com acquired popular social networking website, ASKfm, where users can ask other users questions, with the option of anonymity. As of 14 August 2014, Ask.fm had 180 million monthly unique users in more than 150 countries around the world, with its largest user base in the United States. Available on the web and as a mobile app, ASKfm generates an estimated 20,000 questions per minute with approximately 45 percent of its mobile monthly active users logging in daily. To date, the mobile app has been downloaded more than 40 million times.

Toolbar criticism

The Ask browser toolbar is an extension that can appear as an extra bar added to the browser's window and/or menu. In early versions, it was often unintentionally installed during the installation of partner software, including Oracle Java, i.e., taking advantage of a user's lack of technical experience. As an operating business of IAC, Ask Partner Network had also historically entered into partnerships with some software security vendors, whereby they distributed the toolbar alongside their software. Installer packages for partner companies had an option (opt-out) to install the Ask toolbar and/or change the user's default browser home page to Ask.com.

Ask.com and its parent company IAC have therefore been criticized for promoting a toolbar that behaves like malware—that it was surreptitiously bundled with legitimate program installations, e.g., Oracle's Java, that it could not be easily removed from common browsers once installed, that consumers installed the software unwittingly, that the toolbar redefined the user's home page to Ask.com, and that Ask.com presented biased search results. As early toolbar versions could not be easily removed using built-in uninstall features, it was considered a "potentially unwanted program". A further criticism was a ten-minute delay that was built into the installation, between updating Java and appearance of the Ask toolbar. The company defended these early business decisions, pointing out that instructions to remove the toolbar could be found at the Ask.com Help Center.

As of June 2015, Ask.com no longer bundles with Oracle's Java (which now features a Yahoo!). As of June 2015, Microsoft does not consider the toolbar that is being provided by Ask.com to be unwanted software, but they state that older versions of the toolbar pose "a high threat to your PC," and they provide tools for detecting and removing them.

Marketing and promotion

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. A Jeeves balloon appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade through 2000-2004.

After a hiatus from mass consumer marketing, Ask returned to TV advertising in the fall of 2011 after refocusing its site on questions and answers. Instead of national advertising, Ask focused on local markets with basic creative. In the summer of 2012, Ask launched a national cinema campaign, along with other out-of-home tactics in certain markets such as New York and Seattle.

As part of a Seattle-based local market effort, Ask.com launched its “You Asked We Answered” campaign in 2012, in which the company “answered” residents' top complaints about living in their city, including easing morning commutes and stadium traffic, as well as keeping the local Parks and Rec department wading pools open.

On 14 January 2009, Ask.com became the official sponsor of 2000 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Champion Bobby Labonte's No. 96 Ford. Ask would become the official search engine of NASCAR. 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. The Ask.com car debuted in the 2009 Bud Shootout where it failed to finish the race, but subsequently returned strongly, placing as high as 5th in the 1 March 2009 Shelby 427 race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Ask.com's foray into NASCAR represents the first instance of its venture into what it calls "Super Verticals".