Ask.com, born AskJeeves, may not be much of a contender in the search derby these days, but it continues to innovate, and sees itself as complementary to market leaders such as Google.
The latest from Ask, an IAC/Interactive property, comes in the form of a trial project tapping its employees and community of users to provide direct answers to search queries. This crowd-sourced approach will appear as an option on the site under the heading “Ask the Community,” and the firm will still offer its standard, algorithm-driven search service. Datamation takes a look.
It’s back to the future for the Ask.com search service. One of the early search providers, the company was originally called AskJeeves and focused on providing answers to so-called natural language queries. One could ask “What’s the best way to get a mortgage approved?” and the service would give a full sentence answer on the results page along with the standard set of blue links to relevant sites for more information.
“We’ve been around 15 years and the root of our service is questions and answers,” Tony Gentile, Ask’s senior vice president of product management, told InternetNews.com.