WebProNews

How Important is Natural Language to the Future of Search?

Where Google is a search engine, and Bing is a "decision engine," Ask.com seeks to be an answer engine. Ask thinks the future of search is in questions and answers. This means, you should be able to ask a direct question and get a specific answer, rather than pages of results, which can lead you to finding the answer on your own.

Ask.com Gets New U.S. Leadership

On Friday Ask.com announced that it has promoted Doug Leeds to President of Ask.com U.S. In addition, Tony Gentile has joined the company as Senior Vice President, Product Management. 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.

Ask Introduces New Deal Feature

Ask.com has added a new feature to its search engine homepage designed to help online shoppers find the best deals on the Web. The IAC owned property has introduced "Ask Deals," a proprietary database of more than 1 million savings offers from national and local retailers across hundreds of product categories. The Ask homepage now features a new tab labeled "Deals" for users who only want to view the best offers online. The Ask Deals database is continuously updated to provide users with the most current savings offers.

Ask Makes Move to Cut Click Fraud

Ask.com has tapped Anchor Intelligence and will use its ClearMark software to score all of its paid search clicks. The goal of Ask's partnership with Anchor Intelligence is to protect its advertisers and partners from paying for fraudulent clicks.

Ask Partners With Symantec On Safer Searches

Ask.com has partnered with security firm Symantec to offer users safer search results in an effort to attract more traffic. Ask and Symantec developed Safe Search that makes searching the Web safer by providing users with ratings before they visit a site that could damage or infect their computer.

Top Question Of 08: The Birds & the Bees

Another search engine, another set of top ten lists for 2008. But hey, they’re always pretty interesting as a sort of mirror of our society.

Ask.com Helps Users With Election Poll Times

Ask.com, a web site that offers search for web sites, images, news, blogs, video, maps and directions, local search and shopping, launched their new “Election Poll Smart Answers” that gives you local polling information in just one click: and it’s a lot faster and easier than any other major search engine. Ask.com Smart Answers are special search results placed at the top of the Ask.com search results page that have quick facts and links to authoritative content from highly respected sources.

Google Inches Closer To 70 Percent Of Search

US market share of search queries rose again at Google, while that of its next three competitors dropped.

Ask Grabs Space On Photobucket

A bright spot for Ask.com emerged with news of a partnership with image sharing service Photobucket.

Ask.com Expands Vocabulary With Dictionary.com Acquisition

In a move to significantly expand the reach of its network, Ask.com has just acquired the Lexico Publishing Group, owners of dictionary.com, thesaurus.com and reference.com