Ask.com, leading website for all kinds of queries which also happens to be fourth largest search engine in the country just behind Google, Yahoo and Bing, is presently readying a brand new redesign as it launches a public beta of its new answer technology.
"Ask.com is now uniquely able to offer the most comprehensive and convenient approach to getting answers, combining pages and people to help users find the answers to all questions – even questions for which no answer is published online," senior vice presidents Tony Gentile and Lista Kavanaugh wrote in a blog post.
"[The beta] combines our proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques," reads the company blog post. The new technology is embedded with 500 million question and answer pairs, answers from human "experts," and most importantly as a redesigned user interface.
The site’s relaunch was rumored since November 2009, the ask.com said insists that "today's beta release is really just the tip of the iceberg," indicating greater interaction with third-party social networks and increased mobile support. The invite-only community resembles Aardvark, the "social search service" that Google acquired in February. You shoot a question and it gets to someone who may have the answer.
"Ask.com has the ability to route questions to relevant people based on interests and expertise," the company says. "This means only the right people will be asked to answer a specific question, reducing spam and question fatigue."
