Ask.com

Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, is an Internet search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was architected and implemented by Gary Chevsky. The RODA Group, a venture capital firm, were early investors. Rob Wrubel joined the company as CEO in 1998 and led the company until late 2001, when he was replaced by Skip Battle. __NOEDITSECTION__ Ask.com owns a variety of popular web destinations including country-specific sites for 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 its properties places Ask.com in the top ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004.

Ask Jeeves history

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where Jeeves is the name of the "gentleman's gentleman" or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorenson), supposed to be the person who fetches you the answers of any query you ask. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The original idea of the Ask Jeeves when it was first launched in 1996, was to answer questions in natural language. As time wore on and keyword search engines such as Google rose to prominence, Ask Jeeves suffered a loss of many of its users. The technology was reworked to allow keyword searches as well, but by this time Ask Jeeves had dropped below Google, MSN, and Yahoo! in the size of their userbase.

Jeeves' retirement

On 23 September 2005 the company announced plans to phase out the character , and on 27 February 2006 Jeeves was disassociated with Ask.com. A competition was run on Ask for Kids as to what Jeeves should do when he retires. The winner was World Cruises.

The decision to cut Jeeves has been a very controversial one. Ask.com argues that their company needed a fresh start, but many users have been vocally critical of the decision, saying that the move "took away the company's face". The webmaster of the Save Jeeves Blog called the move "The Internet's version of New Coke", and that it would drive users away because it was too "serious".

Technology and concepts

The original idea behind Ask.com was the ability to answer questions asked in 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 and strives to be more intuitive and user-friendly than other search engines. Ask Jeeves sold the same technology used on the ask.com site to corporate entities including Dell, Toshiba, and E*Trade. That part of the business was sold to Kanisa in 2002.

Ask.com-owned Teoma search technology uses subject-specific link popularity to compute "authoritativeness" of a search result. The Teoma technology also incorporates patented click popularity techniques, originally from the DirectHit search engine, which Ask Jeeves acquired in 2000. On 26 February 2006 Teoma was rebranded and redirected to Ask.com.

Corporate details

Ask.com stock traded on 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.com stock soared more than 500% throughout the course of the year. In July 2005, ASKJ ticker was retired upon the closing of the acquisition by IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC/InterActiveCorp trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol IACI. The IAC/InterActiveCorp deal was announced in March 2005 valuing ASKJ at dollar|$" target="_blank" >^*1.85 billion. IAC/InterActiveCorp is a media holding company founded and run by Barry Diller.

References

23 September 2005. "Ask Jeeves decides to axe Jeeves" at BBC News. Accessed 23 September 2005.
10 February 2006. " Search site retires iconic Jeeves" at BBC News. Accessed 11 February 2006.
26 February 2006. "Another Brand Retirement of Note: Teoma" at the Ask.com Blog. Accessed 27 February 2006.

Major Competitors

External links

Ask.com | Ask.com | Ask Jeeves

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