Earlier this year Ask.com opened up its community portion of the site to its entire user base. This gave users the ability to ask questions and get answers from people. Since then, the company has been re-tooling its site looking …

Earlier this week, we looked at Bing’s year-end round-up (be it a little early) of the top searches of 2011. And the lists continue as today both AOL and Ask released their versions. Ask’s fittingly come in the form of …

We thought it would be fun to take a walk down search engine memory lane and look at what some of the search engines from the times before Google’s domination are up to these days. Remember the days when the …

Ask has 63 million users these days. That is one thing that stands out in the company’s latest announcement. The announcement itself is that Ask.com has launched its human-powered Q&A service “Ask People” to all of those users. This has …

Ask has launched a new Android app offering a mobile Q&A service to users. The launch follows that of its iPhone app, which recently surpassed a million downloads. “We have placed a big bet on mobile as part of our …

Ask has announced several major partnerships designed to fuel the company’s growing Q&A service. More specifically, the partnerships will drive expansion of Ask’s “smart answers” across more categories including: sports, recipes, travel and music. The point of the “smart answers” …

Online video continues to blow up, and a lot of startups are capitalizing on it. Ask says that as a Q&A site, it sees a larger percentage of “how to” questions around art, science, cooking and exercise that are “begging …

This week, Ask.com celebrated its 15-year anniversary. You may recall a time when Ask was one of the most-used and talked about search engines on the web, and now the company has basically abandoned search in favor of a focus …

Ask announced a couple weeks ago that it would be debuting a new mobile app called Ask Around here at SXSW. WebProNews caught up with Ask.com Chief Product and Technology Officer Lisa Kavanaugh to talk about it a little. “We …

Ask announced today that it is rolling out the ability to personalize the Q&A experience, which has become the core focus of the site. 

Ask users can use the "Browse by Interests" tab to view questions/answers (content) that are relevant to them, which should make the experience a great deal more useful. 

As Christmas approaches, Ask is sharing some info about the hottest gift items this season, based on users of its Q&A service. 

According to Ask’s findings, in the gaming category, Xbox is at the top of the list, with over 5% of all Ask.com questions being related to the console. According to the company, gamers asked nearly five times more questions about the Xbox than the Sony Playstation. Nintendo’s Wii was somewhere in between. 

It’s now December, and in the search industry, that means it’s the time of the year that we get to look at the most searched things of the year. Bing shared its top ten searches the other day. Ask recently retired from true search, in order to focus on the niche its name suggests – questions and answers. 

A Web pioneer of sorts is retiring from one of the industry’s most visible fights. Today, the president of Ask.com announced that Ask will dedicate all its resources to improving its Q&A service, and as a result, will no longer …

Google continued its reign over the U.S. search market in August with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo with 17.4 percent (up 0.3 percentage points) and Microsoft with 11.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points), according to the latest analysis from comScore.

 Ask saw no change month-over-month capturing 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL, which also remained flat with 2.3 percent of the market.

A couple months back, Ask unveiled its new redesign with a heavy focus on Q&A (read our interview with Ask SVP of Product Management Tony Gentile here). Now, the company has launched a Q&A Partner Platform to help grow its community of people who can answer questions.

We’ve known that Ask has been working on a new version of Ask.com for months, but now it’s here. Ask is placing new emphasis on the Q&A side of search, and is injecting the Q&A experience directly into the main search experience, which is what SVP of Product Management Tony Gentile tells WebProNews, sets the new Ask apart from other Q&A sites.

Bing had the most search growth for the month of June, growing 7 percent month- over-month to capture 9.85 percent of the U.S. search market, according to the latest figures released by Hitwise.

Google accounted for 71.65 percent of the search market, but saw a one percent drop in growth month-over-month.  Yahoo’s search growth was flat, accounting for 14.37 percent of the market and Ask captured 2.19 percent of the search market, with 2 percent growth month-over-month.

Ask Jeeves co-founder David Warthen has joined citizen journalism-meets-mainstream journalism site Allvoices as Chief Technology Officer. He will be responsible for the technical direction of the company.

Ask’s Dictionary.com has reached the 10 million download milestone for its mobile apps in just over a year. Dictionary.com gets about 50 million unique visitors a month between its site and its mobile apps.

The company’s new iPad app already has over 100,000 downloads to date. I spoke with Dictionary.com President Shravan Goli who expressed a great deal of excitement about the iPad and tablet-style devices in general.

At least in terms of percentages, LinkedIn’s board of directors expanded by quite a bit today.  Indeed, it grew 25 percent thanks to the addition of Skip Battle, who served as the CEO of Ask.com between early 2001 and the middle of 2005.

Yesterday, news broke that Google was acquiring social Q&A site Aardvark for about $50 million. Aardvark sent its users an email today saying:

Dear friends,