“As we’ve all seen, Q&A sites are growing in popularity and there’s a reason for it; people are inherently curious AND want to share their expertise and answers/opinions,” Ask CTO Lisa Kavanaugh tells WebProNews. “By seeing how our 60 million users are interacting on Ask.com, people really do want to help others out by sharing their own knowledge and opinions on topics they care about.”

Ask is rolling out a new feature on its Category pages – the top categories of questions people ask on the site. Categories include: Arts, Cars & Transportation, Entertainment, Food & Drink, Politics & Government, Science, Sports & Recreation, Technology, etc. Ask will place the most asked and answered questions front and center.

Ask believes this will drive the community to become more social (answering, commenting and asking more questions). The Category pages themselves, Ask says, are designed to create appealing destinations people return to often.

“These pages have been reorganized to create a compelling destination for Ask.com users that are passionate about certain topics, prompting them to ask more questions, and compelling them to answer more meaningfully,” the company tells us. “These pages are more visually appealing and engaging because they’re showing what excites people most by pushing the most popular content front and center.”

“Ask.com is always studying and analyzing user behavior in the community and we proactively made this change,” a spokesperson says. “We’re exploring several new techniques to help keep users engaged on the site even longer and to keep Ask as their go-to destination when it comes to getting answers to their questions. We believe this change will help increase engagement on the category pages and increase content contribution in each category.”

Users will still be able to view recently asked questions, and can see them by scrolling down on each Category Page.

Ask says it gets twice as many visits from people who pose questions to each other, as opposed to the search box. That’s pretty obvious if you think about it. They’re going to return to see the answers. 60 million users is a lot of people. Keeping them coming back and finding a way to keep them engaged is key.

Ask’s fittingly come in the form of the top questions. They were also thoughtful enough to include a video about them.

“Because people come to Ask with specific questions we are uniquely able to understand what’s on consumers’ minds at any given moment, be it pop culture or politics,” said Doug Leeds, CEO, Ask.com. “For the first time, we’re looking at the year’s top questions to not only reflect on 2011, but also predict the newsmakers of 2012.”

Ask’s top celebrity search terms and questions for 2011 include:

1. Kim Kardashian: Was Kim Kardashian’s wedding fake?
2. Justin Bieber: Is Justin Bieber going to be a dad?
3. Lady Gaga: AreLady Gaga’s face implants real?
4. Beyonce: Did Beyonce fake a baby bump?
5. Kate Middleton: Who made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress?
6. Ashton Kutcher: Did Ashton cheat?
7. Michael Jackson: Was Michael Jackson murdered?
8. Selena Gomez: Is Selena Gomez pregnant?
9. Lindsay Lohan: Is Lindsay Lohan going to jail?
10. Charlie Sheen: What happened to Charlie Sheen’s teeth?

Top news search terms and questions included:

1. Earthquake in Japan: How big was the earthquake in Japan?
2. Hurricane Irene: What caused Hurricane Irene?
3. Steve Jobs: How much was Steve Jobs worth?
4. Royal Wedding: What did William whisper to Kate on the balcony?
5. Occupy Wall Street: Who started Occupy Wall Street?
6. iPhone: When will Apple release the iPhone 5?
7. Osama Bin Laden: Who killed Bin Laden?
8. Casey Anthony: Where is Casey Anthony hiding?
9. 10th Anniversary of September 11: What is happening on the 10th anniversary of 9/11?
10. AmyWinehouse: How did Amy Winehouse die?

Top political searches and questions included:

1. Barack Obama: Will Obama get re-elected?
2. Mitt Romney: What is Mitt Romney’s religion?
3. Sarah Palin: Is Sarah Palin running for president?
4. Michele Bachmann: Is Michele Bachmann crazy?
5. Anthony Weiner: Where can I find Anthony Weiner’s Twitter pics?
6. Arnold Schwarzenegger: Who was Arnold’s mistress?
7. Gay Marriage: Which states allow gay marriage?
8. Withdrawl from Iraq: When will the troops come home?
9. Iowa Caucus: When is the Iowa caucus?
10. Muammar Ghadafi: Who will lead Libya after Ghadafi?

Ask’s 2012 predictions list is as follows:

1. George Clooney wins his second AND third Academy Award
2. Dr. Oz surpasses Dr. Phil in ratings in a post-Oprah world
3. Green Bay Packers wins Super Bowl second year in a row
4. McDonald’s adds the McRib to its permanent menu
5. New York reclaims its spot as top the US travel destination from 2011 leader Orlando
6. Breakout star of 2011, Nicki Minaj, leapfrogs pop icon Katy Perry in album sales
7. Pippa jumps onto the list of top ten baby names of the year
8. Facebook goes public with world’s largest IPO
9. Tiger Woods retires from golf
And, finally…will the world end in 2012?

10. Spoiler alert! IT WON’T

And now on to the AOL side of things.

“AOL is one of the starting points for conversations on the Web and this year’s search results reflect that,” said Francis Lobo, Senior Vice President, AOL Search. “Using our data and insights tools, we captured the pulse of the 2011 online dialogue – from Casey Anthony and Charlie Sheen, to Ted Williams and Lady Gaga, our search results reveal the news, entertainment and pop culture memes that captivated consumers this year.”

News

1. Casey Anthony Trial
2. Gabrielle Giffords Shooting
3. Royal Wedding
4. Japan Earthquake
5. Arab Spring
6. Penn State Scandal
7. Osama bin Laden Death
8. Occupy Wall Street
9. Debt Ceiling Debate
10. European Debt Crisis

Celebrities

1. Charlie Sheen
2. Justin Bieber
3. Kate Middleton
4. Jennifer Aniston
5. Kim Kardashian
6. Tiger Woods
7. Lindsay Lohan
8. Amy Winehouse
9. Glenn Beck
10. Pippa Middleton

Memes

1. Ted Williams
2. Planking
3. Serene Branson
4. Anonymous
5. My Little Pony
6. Ancient Aliens
7. Nyan Cat
8. Rebecca Black Friday
9. Tiger Mom
10. Qwikster

Presidential Candidates

1. Barack Obama
2. Herman Cain
3. Michele Bachmann
4. Rick Perry
5. Ron Paul
6. Mitt Romney
7. Newt Gingrich
8. Rick Santorum
9. Jon Huntsman
10. Gary Johnson

“How…”

1. How can I pay off my credit card?
2. How tall is Katy Perry?
3. How can I stop snoring?
4. How did Valentine’s Day start?
5. How do you lock your scroll bar?
6. How much is my jewelry worth?
7. How many ounces in a gallon?
8. How do I change my AOL password?
9. How much should I weigh?
10. How did Punxsutawney Phil get his name?

“Is…”

1. Is Whitney Houston pregnant?
2. Is the iPhone 3GS free?
3. Is Dolly Parton her real name?
4. Is Cancun safe for tourists?
5. Is Roseanne Barr a nut farmer?
6. Is heartburn a sign of pregnancy?
7. Is shingles contagious?
8. Is Facebook going to charge?
9. Is there life after death?
10. Is rosemary good for stretch marks?

“Why…”

1. Why did Dick leave Big Brother?
2. Why did the original Becky leave Roseanne?
3. Why did William and Kate split in 2007?
4. Why did Paul Ryan found the Young Guns program?
5. Why did the chicken cross the road?
6. Why did Glenn Beck leave Fox?
7. Why did Ricky Gervais quit Twitter?
8. Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor?
9. Why did my hair thin after giving birth?
10. Why did Jerry Lewis leave MDA?

I’m going to look at results for the same query across each one just as a comparison. I’ll use the classic “level 4 brain cancer” query that we’ve looked at on Google various times throughout the content farm/Panda update discussion this year.

We first used this example to show where non-authoritative information was being surfaced for important health-related queries in Google, prior to the launch of the Panda update.

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996, and eventually became Ask.com, although it’s still Ask Jeeves in the UK. While there was always an emphasis on Q&A, this is very much the case these days. Here’s what it looks like:

The results:

Alta Vista

AltaVista was founded in 1995. Eventually it was purchased by Overture, which was taken over by Yahoo. Last year, Yahoo indicated that it would be shutting AltaVista down, but so far it is still live, delivering Yahoo results with an AltaVista logo. Here’s what it looks like:

The results:

AlltheWeb

AlltheWeb came out in 1999. It was eventually bought up by Overture, which was taken over by Yahoo. It was just earlier this year that Yahoo simply started directing it to search.yahoo.com.

Excite

Excite was founded in 1994. Ten years later it was acquired by Ask Jeeves. Now it’s owned by IAC, which also owns Ask. Here’s what it looks like today:

The results:

Lycos

Lycos was founded in 1994. In 2000, it merged with Terra Networks to become Terra Lycos. In 2004, Lycos was sold to Daum Communications. In 2010, it was sold to Ybrant Digital. Here’s what it looks like these days:

The results:

HotBot

HotBot was launched in 1996 by Wired Magazine, and is now owned by Lycos. Here’s what it looks like these days:

The results:

Infoseek

Infoseek was founded in 1994, and was eventually bought by The Walt Disney Company. It then was rolled into Go.com, but has been replaced by Yahoo’s search, which is interesting, considering that Yahoo’s search has been replaced by Bing. Here’s what it looks like:

The results (they simply redirect to Yahoo search results):

WebCrawler

WebCrawler is a metasearch engine. It launched in 1994, was bought by AOL in 1995, and sold to Excite in 1997. Infospace acquired it in 2001. Currently its results pull from Google, Yahoo and Bing. This was actually my go to search engine before discovering Google. That seems so long ago. Here’s what it looks like today:

The results:

DogPile

DogPile is similar to WebCrawler, and is also now owned by Infospace. It was launched in 1996. Here’s what it looks like today:

The results:

Mamma.com

Mamma.com, a metasearch engine, was launched in 1996. The company eventually purchased Copernic, and changed its name to Copernic Inc. In 2009, Copernic sold Mamma.com to Empresario.

There’s currently a message on the Mamma.com saying that a new version is on the way. Here’s what it currently looks like:

The Results:

The moral of the story: a lot of search engines think eHow has the best result for “level 4 brain cancer”. That includes Bing and Yahoo. Google is going with Harvard’s MGH Brain Tumor Center for its top result for the query. Blekko is going with Cancer.org. DuckDuckGo is going with medical-answers.org.

When was the last time you used any of these old school search engines? Let us know in the comments.

The announcement itself is that Ask.com has launched its human-powered Q&A service “Ask People” to all of those users. This has only been available to a portion of them in limited beta until now.

Ask has also launched a redesign to “deeply infuse user-generated answers across the site and within search results”

“The redesign accelerates Ask.com’s transition from pure algorithmic Web search to a Q&A site and mobile service fueled by the ability to search the Web for answers or connect with other users for personal opinions,” the company says.

“Ask’s approach to Q&A is unique – we embrace questions where we can deliver answers in milliseconds from content on the Web, but also deeply appreciate that crawlers can’t replace human experience,” said CEO Doug Leeds. “Our limited exposure beta period allowed us to learn where humans and search best intersect as mechanisms for getting credible answers to the millions of questions – fact-based or subjective – we receive each day. Today’s launch combines the best of these two worlds into a single, comprehensive Q&A destination.”

Read our recent interview with Leeds here.

The new Ask Q&A experience is a valuable from the web, as well as from iOS and Android. Last week, Ask launched its new Android app, following up its iPhone app which surpassed a million downloads.

“We have placed a big bet on mobile as part of our growth strategy, and it’s paying off with four times the answer rate as our site users,” said Jason Rupp, senior director of product management at Ask.com. “Over the last three quarters there was triple digit growth in traffic from smartphones to the Ask.com mobile site, and 60 percent of that was Android. To win in mobile, you must win on Android.”

That emphasis on mobile has become quite evident. Here’s an interview we did with the company at SXSW a few months back, discussing its Ask Around location-based Q&A app:

Features of the new Android app include:

• Voice to text: Simply ask questions, no typing required.
• Web combined with real people: Get web results as well as top-voted published answers from other Ask.com users in milliseconds.
• Send a question to a real user: Want another opinion? Route the question to a live person in the Ask.com Q&A community, or browse and respond to other users’ questions.
• Set it and forget it: Push notifications alert you to when a new answer has arrived.
• Personalize Q&A by interest: New for Android users, the app allows you to filter Q&A by topics that match your profile.
• Follow feature: Follow users who provide interesting answers, and personalize your Q&A experience with content from these connections.

Last week, Ask announced some new partnerships it is using to help bolster its “Smart Answers”.

The point of the “smart answers” feature of Ask is to give users real answers, as opposed to links to web content – when applicable, and include an “exact answer” right at the top of the page. The product is still in limited beta.

New partners include: Sports Network, Lonely Planet, Calorie Counter, IGN Entertainment and Lyrics.com.

“Ask.com is unique from other Q&A sites in that we have a real mechanism for scouring the Web for answers to questions, in addition to helping people connect with each other for information,” said Shane McGilloway, executive vice president of business operations at Ask.com. “With Ask.com Smart Answers, users do a search or ask a question and get a clear cut answer from a credible source in a fraction of a second – an approach that yields increased user satisfaction as well as frequency and retention. With the expansion of Smart Answers into these new, high volume categories, millions more people will experience this benefit.”

“As one of the most established players in Q&A, Ask.com sees more questions than practically anyone, and with a growing number of them sports-related, this partnership makes perfect sense,” said Ken Zajac, director of sales for The Sports Network. “Smart Answers help people save time and effort, and make it possible for us to engage with millions of Ask users every day.”

Ask says that to ensure quality, it generates Smart Answers from a select pool of content partners “carefully vetted based on criteria like authority, relevance and subject matter depth.” Ask then uses natural language processing to match exact answers to specific questions. The answer appear on Ask.com and in the Ask Mobile Q&A App.

WebProNews discussed Ask’s efforts in mobile, location-based Q&A with the company at SXSW a few months ago:

Ask says food, sports and health are among the most popular categories on its service.

“The Q&A category is bigger than ever because no one has cracked this quite yet – and we are in an excellent position to do so given our approach and history with the consumer,” CEO Doug Leeds told WebProNews recently. “Also, you’ll see us continue to invest in mobile over the next five years, as Q&A behavior increasingly translates to mobile devices. We have a pretty aggressive mobile product roadmap. I’d like to see us as the dominant provider of mobile Q&A services a few years from now.”

It is doing this by integrating Google’s YouTube API into the Ask.com user community. When a user includes a YouTube link in their answer to a question, the response will include a full thumbnail and metadata info, including playback for the video within the page (similar to Facebook’s display). Video will be infused across Ask’s Answer products and web results. Ask’s “Smart Answers” will now more heavily embed video, and overall results will enable full play back of video on the results page.

David Amato, Director, Business Development at Ask tells WebProNews, “The API allows us to do a few things differently; most importantly, it will be easier for us to feature and scale video content across our site, both within user-generated answers and algorithmic responses. Currently we see around 1 million clicks a month go to YouTube to watch video; this will allow users the full video experience in the context of an answer to a question, right on the Ask.com site. And yes, this integration is a first step in laying the groundwork for richer video features down the road, such as the potential for users to record and upload their own video answers.”

Ask says the news is simply a first step of a “multi-pronged approach to integrate videos in various ways (that recording and uploading of video answers straight from mobile and desktop devices will come later this year).

“Video is hugely important for our users, and it’s becoming more critical for our partners as well,” Amato tells us. “Partners in our Branded Q&A pilot program will be able to distribute any of their own video assets in response to relevant questions from our growing community. Our Smart Answer units will showcase video directly within the answer itself, enabling partners who supply content to these units to present users with more helpful detail.”

When asked about mobile, he says, “These features are less relevant on mobile devices, most of which have the YouTube video player already embedded. That said, we will be adding video thumbnails to relevant answers in our iPhone app soon. We’ve also optimized video results in our recently launched smartphone-friendly site to include images that, once tapped, trigger the player to launch.”

Last month, we had a conversation with Ask CEO Doug Leeds. We asked him where Ask will be in another 5 years, and he didn’t mention video, but he did say, ““There is a huge opportunity before us. The Q&A category is bigger than ever because no one has cracked this quite yet – and we are in an excellent position to do so given our approach and history with the consumer. Also, you’ll see us continue to invest in mobile over the next five years, as Q&A behavior increasingly translates to mobile devices. We have a pretty aggressive mobile product roadmap. I’d like to see us as the dominant provider of mobile Q&A services a few years from now.”

Ask.com had over 60.5 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. alone in May (Compete), and that’s up from the previous month. To put that into perspective, Twitter.com had only about 29 million. AOL.com only had about 49.

The YouTube API functionality will launch later this summer.

We had the chance to ask CEO Doug Leeds a few questions about the company’s past and future. Below are those questions and his responses.

Looking back to where Ask was 15 years ago, what surprises you the most about where it is today?

“That we’ve come full circle. Ask has always been about questions and answers, but for a time, competitively speaking, we were focused on search as the primary means to that end. Throughout the last 15 years, one thing has remained constant: users come to us to ask questions and get answers, a behavior different than search. This has never changed – in fact, Ask.com sees more queries in the form of a question than any other site. Today, we’ve gone back to whole-heartedly focusing on that value proposition, but doing so through an approach that blends search with human-powered answers. Approach is different, goal is the same.”

What is Ask’s greatest accomplishment over the past 15 years?

“Many of our 1996 compatriots are no longer in the same business – if they’re in business at all. Ask.com is the 6th biggest property in the US with 90 million users. We’ve survived and grown because we offer users something unique. I’m pretty proud of that.”

Where will Ask be in another 5 years?

“There is a huge opportunity before us. The Q&A category is bigger than ever because no one has cracked this quite yet – and we are in an excellent position to do so given our approach and history with the consumer. Also, you’ll see us continue to invest in mobile over the next five years, as Q&A behavior increasingly translates to mobile devices. We have a pretty aggressive mobile product roadmap. I’d like to see us as the dominant provider of mobile Q&A services a few years from now.”

Ask recently launched “Ask Around,” a mobile app that takes advantage of location and maps, and integrates them into the Q&A experience. We spoke with Ask’s Chief product and technology officer Lisa Kavanaugh about that at SXSW:

Last month when Ask parent company IAC released its earnings, Chairman Barry Diller estimated IAC’s recent contract renewal with Google to be worth $5.5 billion over five years.

To commemorate the 15-year anniversary of Ask.com, the company has launched a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #MyLast15, encouraging people to Tweet, TwitPic or TwitVid their favorite, funniest or even most horrifying memory from over the last 15 years.

“We found that search was getting sort of commoditized, and for us it was really about questions and answers, and our users forgot what they were coming to us for,” she tells us. “We’ve just been investing there, and we found that we use search as an advantage to pulling the answers that are already on the web.”

“We’ve taken the Q&A concept to mobile, which is the really natural use case,” she adds. “People are on the go. They have a question and they want it answered right now, so now, we’ve taken that to ou mobile app.”

“We’ve found that people are starting to use it as a chat a bit,” she says. “They’re using it, they’re commenting, they’re wanting to talk with each other in the Q&A experience. So to tackle that, we’ve created a separate app, which we’re debuting here at SXSW.”

The app itself takes advantage of location, features a map, and let’s you see what’s going on where you’re at. You can login with your Facebook account, so that should reduce any friction in using the app for most people.

“The identity is really important to us, and have it be your real identity. And chat with people that are right there where you are, to see what’s going on,” says Kavanaugh.

She says they’re using the app as an experiment to see where it takes Ask in the mobile, LBS realm.

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. 

"This personalized experience is part of our larger vision for what Ask.com Q&A is about" says Director of Product Management Jason Rupp. "First, if the answer already exists on the Web and you can get it in milliseconds without bugging a single person, we should give it to you. Second, if you do need a person to answer, we should optimize the chances of you getting a high quality answer – quickly – as well as make it easy and fun to ask subsequent questions."

"From a feature standpoint, that means things like intelligent routing so your question is delivered to the people most qualified to answer it first," adds Rupp. "The ability to follow people who consistently provide highly relevant questions and answers on the site also helps you customize your experience. And now, the ability to filter your experience to reflect the questions and answers most pertinent to your life takes that one step further."

Another Q&A site called Quora has been getting a great deal of attention lately, and one of its features is the ability to follow topics as well as people. This new feature would appear to be following this concept, but Ask’s feature lets users grab profile info from other social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn to personalize the Interests they’re following. 

The biggest draw to Quora thus far has been the quality of the content –  the caliber of people answering the questions. CEOs and other company executives, for example, have been answering questions, providing authoritative information. 

As with any site, the quality of Ask’s new features will only be as good as the content that is available. Part of that is up to the user and what they choose to follow. Given that Ask is looking to the web (not just people) for answers, it should be pretty useful.