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| Type | Search Engine |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, USA |
| Key people | Garrett Gruener David Warthen (Founders) Jim Safka (CEO) Scott Garrell (President) |
| Industry | Internet |
| Revenue | ▲ $227 Million |
| Parent | InterActive Corp. |
| Website | Ask.com For other countries, see International. |
Ask.com is a search engine started 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 Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.1
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History
Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorensen), 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. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching.
On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character disappeared from 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. As of June 5, 2007 the site relaunched with a new, more simplistic look.2
In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature,3 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. The Center for Democracy and Technology's positive evaluation of AskEraser4 differed from that of privacy groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center who found problems such as the requirement that HTTP cookies be enabled for AskEraser to function.5
On 4 July 2008 Ask.com announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. Combined, the sites Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com had more than 28 million unique visitors in March, according to Lexico.
International
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).
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
 Ask Jeeves in 1996 |
 Ask Jeeves in 2000 |
 Ask Jeeves in 2001 |
 Ask Jeeves in 2004 |
 Ask.com after Jeeves |
Ask.com in 2007, 2008 |
Information-revolution.org campaign
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.6
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.7 Furthermore, there was a Jeeves balloon in the 2001 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Toolbar
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 Internet, local desktop, and email searching, the ability to save and share web pages and images, personalizable news feeds (ranging from local to International), weather forecasts, stock portfolios, maps, etc....
Like many other ad-supported client software products (including other search toolbars), the Ask toolbar(s) were labeled in the past as malware or spyware by several anti-spyware providers, mostly due to the actions of distribution partners who were discovered to have taken advantage of known Windows exploits to self-install advertising-delivery programs without the computer user's knowledge or consent. The spyware accusations peaked in 2005- 2006 as the Ask toolbars were labeled as spyware by many leading anti-spyware providers, such as Spybot, McAfee, TrendMicro, and others. 8 9 Since then, Ask claims they have severed ties with the partners whose practices earned the Ask toolbar a reputation as spyware and current anti-spyware results seem to support those claims. Ask continues to work with security vendors and anti-spyware providers to monitor the activities of its distribution partners.
More recently, the Ask toolbar has been updated to include additional search functionality and to support the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.
References
- ^ Ask Jeeves, Inc. initial public offering prospectus
- ^ Major Relaunch For Ask: Ask3D, Techcrunch, 2007-06-04. Retrieved on June 5, 2007
- ^ Ask.com Takes the Lead on Log Retention; Microsoft and Yahoo! Follow, eff.org, Retrieved on 2008-01-03
- ^ "Letter to U.S. Federal Trade Commission" (PDF). Center for Democracy and Technology (January 23, 2008). Retrieved on 2008-03-10.
- ^ "Does AskEraser Really Erase?". Electronic Privacy Information Center. Retrieved on 2008-03-10.
- ^ "Ask’s Anti-Google Campaign". outer-court.com (2007-03-18). Retrieved on 2007-03-28.
- ^ "About Ask.com: TV Spots". Retrieved on 2007-04-25.
- ^ "Critics: Ask Jeeves Silently Serves Software", TechNewsWorld 13 Sept., 2005.
- ^ Current Practices of IAC/Ask Toolbars
External links
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 23 November 2008, at 03:55.
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