WebProNews

Remember Ask? You know, the search engine with the Butler. While the company doesn't get brought up in the discussion as much as it once did, it has not surrendered to Google and it's other competitors just yet.

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.