Warthen previously served as CTO for several other companies including social Q&A site AnswerBag, which was second in its space only to Yahoo Answers, and was eventually acquired by Demand Media (sidenote: an interesting deal between AnswerBag and MerchantCircle was recently made). It will be quite interesting to see where he takes Allvoices. If you’re unfamiliar with Allvoices, read our recent interview with CMO Aki Hashmi about just what the company is doing for the news industry.

"I am delighted to be joining Allvoices, which is leading the transformation of the news industry toward citizen journalism by pushing the state-of-the-art in using self-regulating, scalable, and social technologies," says Warthen. "It is exciting to be part of such a significant and transformative effort. At Allvoices, news itself is being redefined from a top-down editorially controlled activity to a bottom-up massively social activity, which includes coverage of many topics and perspectives that are ignored in the old model."

"David brings tremendous value to the company, and we’re excited to have him on board to lead our outstanding engineering group," says Amra Tareen, founder and CEO of Allvoices. "David has been at the forefront of several groundbreaking technology innovations, and his skills and expertise will further strengthen Allvoices."

Under Warthen’s technical leadership, Ask Jeeves became one of the top Internet search engines in the world just 18 months after the site launched in 1997. The company was acquired by InterActive Corp (IAC), run by media mogul Barry Diller, for $1.85 billion in 2005 and was of course rebranded as Ask.com.

It’s natural language search, and it’s not exactly a new concept. However, Ask says it is dedicated to improving how well this works. It makes sense, since the Q&A niche has been the area of search, which Ask has carved out for itself. Rather than trying to compete directly with Google as Bing does, Ask appears to be more interested in setting itself apart as a place to go simply to find answers. "Asking a question isn’t the same as searching," says Ask.

How imporant will natural language search be in the future? Share your thoughts.

Ask illustrates the difference with a couple sample queries, saying that the most successful answers won’t get clicked:

The company says it is seeing increased loyalty from users who conduct question searches, and has seen "a pronounced increase" in the percentage of users who conduct queries in the form of a question. In fact, they claim to see three times more questions as a share of total queries than their competitors.

"Indeed, the information that is directly relevant to many questions most certainly exists; it’s just that it’s locked in people’s heads or captured in unpublished conversations, and therefore inaccessible by traditional search," says Ask President Doug Leeds. "Obviously, this is not a trivial deficiency in a world that is increasingly interconnected and clamoring for perspective, guidance, and shared knowledge at an interpersonal level online."

Ask is setting out to extract and rank existing answers, and index sources of answers that have not yet been published. "To extract and rank existing answers, as opposed to merely ranking web pages that contain information, we have and are continuing to develop a unique set of algorithms and technologies that are based on new signals for relevance specifically tuned to questions and answers," says Leeds, outlining these signals with the following images.

Right now, Ask is focused on developing a new algorithm that utilizes the signals highlighted above. "But our work doesn’t end with extraction and ranking of existing, published answers," says Leeds. "Where our vision really comes to life is in our efforts to index the sources of unpublished knowledge that can generate answers specifically in response to a question, in the moment it’s asked. This is the long tail of questions that are nearly impossible for search engines to answer, but which create incredible value for users when they are."

These include complex questions (like "What is the cheapest way to get to the Austin airport from downtown Austin?"), temporally dependant questions (like "When will the Oakland Bay Bridge re-open?"), and subjective questions (like "What should you do to save a withering tomato plant?").

Ask has reached a milestone of 400 million Q&A pairs in its database, so the engine is already capable of answering a significant amount of questions you might have, but there’s a lot of work to be done in order to give users the "best answers on the planet" in real time, as the company intends to do. It will be interesting to see how Ask’s progress comes along. Leeds promises updates on the company blog as they work their way along.

Do you think Q&A search is an important part of search’s future? Do you think Ask will play a key role in it? Do you ever use Ask to find answers? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Related Articles:

> Ask Gets More Serious About Answers

> Ask.com Gets New U.S. Leadership

> Microsoft Tipped As Most Likely Ask.com Buyer

> Searching for Answers Google Doesn’t Have

Leeds has been with Ask Networks since early 2006, where he has held several different positions. Most recently, he has been President of the company’s Dictionary.com and Chief Operating officer of Ask Networks. Now as President, he will oversee the US business for Ask.com and lead the development, launch, and execution of Ask’s strategy in the U.S.

"Doug’s elevation to President of the Ask.com U.S. business is very timely and important to our future, and his ongoing leadership has led to a broad array of successes across our businesses – driving Ask Networks to become the 6th largest internet property in the U.S.," said Scott Garell, President, Ask Networks.

Leeds has also held executive roles at Yahoo and Vodafone in the past.

"We are also delighted and fortunate to have Tony join us to lead our product management efforts as we continue to innovate for 2010 and beyond," adds Garell.  "I look forward to working closely with Doug and Tony to make Ask the most trusted place for answers on the web."

Gentile will report to Leeds. He has worked as Senior Vice President for Product Management at Healthline.com and Founder and President of product consultancy buzzhit!. He has also held senior positions at Knight-Ridder, Ofoto, MyFamily.com, Adobe and PointCast.

According to data from Compete, Ask.com and Dictionary.com combined for over 39 million unique visitors in the U.S. for the month of September.

If you ask Jeeeves why he’s back, he’ll tell you:

I popped out three years ago to travel the world in a quest for knowledge and I’ve returned to Blighty armed with answers. During my sojourn research showed the public wanted me back, which I found jolly touching. And in that time the engineers toiled hard to make the site look better, work harder and be more personal…just like yours truly! I realise the questions are different now…

"Jeeves brings warmth and humanity to the search experience, and thanks to the enhancements we have made to our site, he is even better at providing answers than ever before so bringing him back is a perfect fit," says Cesar Mascaraque, managing director of Ask Jeeves Europe.

In case you are wondering what these enhancements are, the company says that since Jeeves has been gone, they’ve focused hard on improving speed, look, and relevancy of search results.

"We know from increased retention levels, that our users prefer the improved site. And, in times like these we know our users are looking for answers for practical everyday needs like saving money and how to feed a family on a budget."

I would not be surprised to see Jeeves make a return to the home page of ask.com on a global scale. In an industry where brand dominates loyalty, Jeeves has always been the strongest brand Ask has ever had, and quite frankly, it may have been a mistake to part with him in the first place.

Jeeves came out in 1997, but was laid to rest in 2006. The company cites a poll from YouGov, which found that the majority of respondents wanted Jeeves back. Will Jeeves shoot the search engine past the competition? Not likely, but it probably can’t hurt.

Ask has now announced some advances in its semantic search technology. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of Semantic Search, Wikipedia explains it:

Semantic Search attempts to augment and improve the search process by leveraging XML and RDF data from semantic networks to disambiguate semantic search queries and web text in order to increase relevancy of results.

Tomasz Imielinski, EVP of Global Search and Answers explains Ask’s changes on the company blog:

In October last year we introduced our proprietary DADS(SM) (Direct Answers from Databases), DAFS(SM) (Direct Answers from Search), and AnswerFarm(SM) technologies, which are breaking new ground in the areas of semantic, web text, and answer farm search technologies. Specifically, the increasing availability of structured data in the form of databases and XML feeds has fueled advances in our proprietary DADS technology.  With DADS, we no longer rely on text-matching simple keywords, but rather we parse users’ queries and then we form database queries, which return answers from the structured data in real time.  Front and center. Our aspiration is to instantly deliver the correct answer no matter how you phrased your query.

Many of the categories consumers care about most are rich with structured data – meaning almost anything you’d want to know about that category exists in a database or XML feed somewhere. Extracting it for practical use is another matter.

Imielinski uses the example of TV Listings to illustrate what he’s talking about. Queries like " Football on TV this weekend " and " Movies on TV now " illustrate how Ask’s search engine delivers these semantic results:

As Peter Young at Marketing Pilgrim puts it, "Whilst integration of this technology is currently limited, it certainly shows a level of innovation sometimes lacking from some of Ask’s competitors. On a personal level I am not sure this is going to lift Ask above competitors such as Google, Yahoo and MSN in the short term, however it is certainly indicative of an ongoing commitment to search, which is often in doubt."

If you ask me, they should have never dropped the "Jeeves," a brand that many people came to recognize. Imielinski promises more improvements on the semantic search front in the future.

A high-profile hire for the company, which has obviously helped put them on my – and other’s – radar. Answerbag appears to be betting on the “Yahoo Answers” model that has helped Yahoo increase it’s search traffic.

Big question; can Answerbag ever make it on its own? My guess is the company will make itself an attractive acquisition for some search engine.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.