Ask.com is a search engine. It is a business division of IAC Search & Media, and was founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.. The company also operates localized services in UK (Ask.com UK), Germany (Ask.com Deutschland), Spain (Ask.com España), Italy (Ask.com Italia), the Netherlands (Ask.com Nederland)and Japan (Ask.jp).

History

Jeeves

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal 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. 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. 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 headquarters in Oakland, CA

On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character was disassociated with Ask.com.

Ask.com owns a variety of sites 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 these web sites places Ask.com in the top ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004. As of June 5, 2007 the site relaunched with a new, more simplistic look.

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.

Corporate details

Ask Jeeves, Inc. stock traded on the 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 Jeeves stock soared more than 500% throughout the course of the year. In July 2005, the ASKJ ticker was retired upon the closing of the acquisition by IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC/InterActiveCorp trades on the 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.

Marketing and promotion

Evolution of logos

Information-revolution.org campaign

The logo used by Ask Jeeves at www.information- revolution.org

In early 2007 a number of advertisements appeared on London Underground trains warning commuters that 75% of all the information on the web flowed through one site (implied to be Google), with a URL for www.information-revolution.org. Links also appeared on the homepage of Ask.com and in videos on YouTube. Both the adverts and website were designed in shades of red, white and black associated with anarchist movements. The website was intended to foster debate about the use of search engines, with messages such as "One source isn't choice". However, when web users found out that the site was actually a form of astroturfing by the marketing company Profero, the blogging arena became overwhelmed with negative messages berating Ask.com for their cynical attempt at marketing. Several users noticed the fact that for a short period, doing a search on Ask for "google" would return the information-revolution site as the first result. Television advertising

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. Furthermore, there was a Jeeves balloon in the Macy Thankgiving Parade years ago.

Toolbar

Example of an Ask search of Wikipedia.

The Ask.com toolbar is a free toolbar from Ask.com. It is available for both the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers.

Features include desktop and e-mail searching, weather forecasts, stock portfolios, and a zooming feature which increases the size of any webpage. It has been reported to include spyware.