Everyone likes a deal, and there are gazillions to be found on the Web, from coupons to discounts and the oft-quoted “limited time offers.” There’s just one problem: how to find the ones you really want.
“There are lots of sites for coupons and deals but they vary in quality and we’re seeing consumers confused about where to go,” Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks, told InternetNews.com.
Ask’s solution is Ask Deals an aggregated “one-stop shop” of coupons and deals that launched today with over a million coupons and discount offers. Garell said Ask Deals scours almost all of the top 40 coupon sites as well as various community sites to find the best deals.
The site is refreshed daily and of course, leveraging Ask’s search heritage and expertise, you can search for deals on specific items, from juicers to restaurants to flash drives and even vacation packages.
The main Ask.com search site also now has a “deal$” option so you can search right in the box you might otherwise use for more conventional searches. Ask Deals uses the company’s “Deal Detector” technology to scan millions of online promotions, store circulars, and nearly 40 of the top coupon sites.
The Deal Detector also crawls user-generated content on community forums, message boards, and blogs to find what popular deals consumers are sharing with each other. Ask said it also filters out repetitive, invalid, and expired offers, while its editorial team highlights “extraordinary” deals with particularly big savings.
Consumers can also get a specially selected “Deal of the Day” streamed right to their home page if they choose an Ask Deals homepage skin. Ask.com also identifies the IP address to present local deals.
Given the rough economy, the timing for a site offering money saving offers is good. According to comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), almost 60 percent of consumers now say they are using coupons more often to reduce their shopping expenses and more than half of those said they are getting coupons from online services.
Garell said ‘Deals’ fits with Ask.com’s mission to provide answers. “With other sites, you as the user have to do all the work, we just give you the answer, not a sea of blue links,” he said.
