Ask.com

Ask.com, is an Internet search engine. It is also the company name of the division of IAC Search & Media, 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.

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 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 and strives to be more intuitive and user-friendly than other search engines. In other words, when you ask a question, it searches for the answer. 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.

As time passed and keyword search engines such as Google rose to prominence by indexing more webpages, 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. However, because Ask.com was slow to index some new webpages, Ask.com did not suffer the onslaught of computer-generated linkspam results that initially flooded Google Search, MSN Search, and Yahoo! Search and buried significant webpages that Ask Jeeves (or Ask.com) could still find.

New features are first tested out on http://www.askx.com page before being released to the main search page.

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.

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.