The Next Frontier in Search: Questions & Answers

A few months ago at SemTech 2009 we announced that our questions and answers database –launched almost a year ago – had grown to more than 300 million high-quality Q&A pairs. “High-quality” means that we use our semantic and extraction capabilities to recognize the best answer from within the sea of information on relevant pages. Instead of 10 blue links, we deliver the best answer right at the top of the page.

This week we’ve achieved another significant milestone by reaching 400 million Q&A pairs, and I want to acknowledge the outstanding work of our engineering and product teams who have built one of the largest and most useful Q&A collections on the web.

I also want to share what we’re seeing from our users in response to our Q&A offerings, and to preview what’s next for Ask.

Our Q&A strategy has started to pay off. We see increasing loyalty among users who conduct question searches on Ask. Simultaneously, we’ve seen a pronounced increase in the percentage of users on Ask who conduct queries in the form of a question – we now see 3x more questions on our site as a share of total queries than our competitors. And perhaps most rewarding for us is when we ask Internet users where they go for questions and answers online, they consistently rank Ask.com first, making us the #1 brand for questions and answers online.

Online search in the form of natural-language questions was the ingenious proposition of the original Ask Jeeves in 1996, and frankly, it’s the reason we’re still around today after so many other Internet brands didn’t survive. 

As the leader in questions for more than a decade, one thing is crystal clear: Asking a question isn’t the same as searching.

Our users tell us that their expectation when asking a question is different from their expectation when conducting a search. When asking a question, they have a specific need for a specific piece of information. When conducting a search, they’re browsing for information, sorting through results to unearth the answer they’re looking for. 

Put another way, when asking a question, you expect the work to be done for you (much like when you ask a librarian for a book at the library). When conducting a search, you do the work yourself (skipping the librarian, and heading to the card catalog instead).

Further, with the advent of the social web, asking questions online is now more natural, as we have the ability to broadcast a question to real people, our friends, instead of hoping a computer can understand our inquiry.

I firmly believe that questions are the future of search, but search technologies as we know them today can’t deliver against this future.

And this brings me to what’s next for Ask.

We’re focused on solving the two shortcomings of search as it relates to questions:

1. Traditional search signals don’t work well for answers to questions.
2. The answers to many questions are wrong or don’t exist online.

Let me explain what I mean.

When you’re in the business of answering questions, the volume of inbound links to a given web page – a long-accepted search technique for ranking web sites – doesn’t tell you the site with the best answer to a user’s question; it just tells you the most popular page with relevant information. Nor does another search technique, text matching, sufficiently identify the best answer, as the text in a question is rarely found in the best answer. Same with a newer though established technique, pioneered at Ask, actually, that uses click-through behavior to determine a site's relevance. Unlike presenting a text snippet that merely describes a site and a link, presenting the actual answer requires no click through to the  
destination site.

Below are some examples which bring this to life.
 
 
 
Without a wholly different approach, search engines will never be able to adequately answer all the questions that users increasingly have for them.

More importantly, no method that merely extracts answers from a published web page will ever be able to access the limitless number of answers that are unpublished on the Internet. 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. 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.
 
At Ask.com, we’re dedicating ourselves to solving these problems and we're approaching the solution in two primary ways: 

1.  Extracting and ranking existing answers
2. Indexing 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.

I’ve outlined a few of these below.

    

 
 
Developing a new Q&A relevance algorithm that draws upon these signals is what we’re focused on building here at Ask, honing our ability to extract answers from the published Internet, and allowing us to fulfill a vastly larger volume of questions than can be done with existing search technologies.

But our work doesn’t end with extraction and ranking of existing, published answers. 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.

Here are some examples:

 

As we accelerate our strategy to answer the world’s questions, these “tough questions” are where we see huge opportunity, and where we are also focusing our efforts. And as you’ve probably guessed by now, we will do this unconventionally, harnessing the equity of the Ask brand, and our loyal, question-loving users to build a community of answerers available through Ask.

We’ve learned at Ask that while the existing Web can solve many problems, when you’re in the pursuit of answering questions, relying on published information sources can really only get you part of the way there. There is an infinite volume of answers in people’s heads that isn’t being indexed by the search engines today, and that can’t be successfully deployed against questions until you unleash it, in real-time, in response to the unique needs expressed by the person asking the question. 

This is the problem we’re in the process of solving here at Ask: Connecting our users’ questions to the best possible answers on the planet – be they published or unpublished. And as we solve this problem, we believe today’s multi-billion dollar questions and answers value proposition will one day transcend search as we know it today.

I’m very passionate about this, and so is our team at Ask.com. You’ll be hearing much more from us on this in the coming months.

Doug

Doug Leeds
President
Ask.com US

Ask Is 'Dancing on Air': “Who Wants a Deal? We Do, We Do!”

We know the economy has been down, and that’s getting folks a little ‘down’ about finding savings in these tough times.
 
Well, with Ask Deals, we’re convinced you’ll soon be celebrating, and getting ‘down’ in a different way…

What do online shoppers do when they nail a good deal online at Ask Deals?

Why they dance, of course!
 
That’s the message behind a new round of Ask advertisements hitting the airwaves, and we’re excited to share some of them below.
 
Today, what we’re most excited about is our new Ask Deals ‘microsite’ that features an interactive version of the jingle you hear in the TV spots – allowing our Ask customers to share and join in the celebration of saving money:

 

How does it work?  Just go to the Ask Deals microsite and enter the name of an item in the Ask Deals search box, and then use your webcam to record yourself dancing and singing along to the Ask Deals catchy tune.

When you’re done, share the experience with your friends on Facebook. When you submit your video to the microsite, a link will be posted after you sign into Facebook to your News Feed. The posts will link your friends back to the Ask Deals microsite, so they can watch your video and create their own:

 

Voila! A savings star is born!

But don’t just take our word (or their word!) for it. Check out Ask Deals, conduct a search for what you’re shopping for, and you’ll see why we’re encouraging everyone to ‘Ask’ before they shop.  With Ask Deals, you get the best deals from all over the internet, all in one place.
 
With Halloween, ‘Black Friday’, and the holiday season all coming up – now is the perfect time to save early, and often! 

 
Click here to view the new Ask Deals advertisements

 - Jared Cluff, SVP of Marketing, Ask.com
 
P.S. – A ‘tip o’ the hat’ to the folks at Agency.com in San Francisco (a unit of Omnicom) for being a great ‘dance’ partner…

Get Smarter on the Go with Dictionary.com’s Free Dictionary & Thesaurus Application for BlackBerry

It’s been six months since we launched our iPhone app and three million+ downloads later, we’re excited to take the next major step towards offering our unique experience to even more Smartphone users. With our new application for BlackBerry® we are expanding Dictionary.com's addressable market to a potential 65 percent of U.S.* smartphone users.

Our pocket English dictionary and thesaurus application is the only free dictionary and thesaurus app currently available for BlackBerry® smartphones. The app was designed to meet the specific professional needs of Blackberry®  smartphone users, so several of the features help them get essential information and answers on the go. 

In addition to providing users with more than 500,000 words, definitions and synonyms, the app features audio pronunciations, spelling suggestions, recent history and Dictionary.com’s popular Word of the Day for both English and Spanish. 

 

The new app also allows users to instantly access a definition or synonym while reading or drafting an email, a feature unique to the Dictionary.com experience on BlackBerry smartphones. You can also email or SMS text any word and its definition to yourself or others right from the app.

Check it out and let us know what you think! The app is available now on BlackBerry App World™ (www.blackberry.com/appworld) and http://dictionary.com/apps/blackberry.  A link to the app can be immediately delivered to your BlackBerry smartphone by texting BBAPP to 44636.  The app is currently available for the BlackBerry® Pearl™, BlackBerry® Curve™ and BlackBerry® 8800 series of smartphones, as well as the BlackBerry® Bold™ and BlackBerry® Tour™ smartphones.  If you have a BlackBerry Smartphone model that is  not yet supported, you can still access Dictionary.com through our mobile website at http://m.dictionary.com.

Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy!

 – The Dictionary.com Team

*Source: m:metrics, three months ending August 2009 (42% RIM, 23% Apple)

Ask Deals: Your One-Click, One-Stop Shop for Savings is Here!

 

Consider this: a tough economy with new, record job losses. Families gathered around kitchen tables with a pencil and calculator trying to make ends meet – every week.  The fact that ‘coupons’ was the sixth most searched for term on Ask in 2008 – and that the number of queries for value-related terms shot up almost 50% so far in 2009.

And, according to comScore, nearly 60% of consumers now cite they are using coupons more often to reduce their shopping expenses – with more than half of them getting coupons from online services.

It’s a perfect recipe for a unique and timely offering like Ask Deals, which we’ve launched today on Ask.com.

To meet the need of our users – and help lift a burden – we’ve developed Ask Deals as a robust, comprehensive and user-friendly way to get coupons and deals of all kinds on the Web for this upcoming shopping season.

Ask Deals cuts through the clutter of invalid, expired, and low-value offers with a database of more than 1 million high-quality, usable offers – refreshed and updated multiple times a day

Ask Deals does many things at once:

--It serves-up all the Web’s best deals in one place. It aggregates high-quality and best-savings offers on the web for hundreds of product categories
--It injects and blends deals right into your search experience, unlike other search engines
--Using Ask’s award-winning Zoom Related Search, it gives consumers additional great discounts on the right panel, next to core search results
--It allows searchers to immediately share the savings they find with family and friends via email, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter
--By choosing the Ask Deals homepage skin, you’ll also get compelling and timely savings offers, hand-picked by the Ask Deals editorial team, right on their search homepage…and, you can also sign up for our new “Deal of the Day” email.

Here's a look at the cool social media sharing feature in AskDeals:

 

  
Building on Ask’s legacy of innovation and cutting-edge technologies, Ask Deals uses proprietary “Deal Detector” technology to sift through the tens of millions of promotions, store circulars, and top online coupons & deals sites to give you one-click savings. By crawling message boards, user-generated content and blogs, we’ll find the popular savings that are moving among users at any given moment.

Ask Deals is the only search engine that actually integrates, blends and injects them right into your search results – saving you time from clicking through endless links by providing the best deals, the first time every time, front-and-center at the top of the page.

Here is the walkthrough of some of the features for this product release.

When the user intent is explicit about coupon and deals query we will blend results using our proprietary Smart Answers technology. Here's an example of a “cheap Halloween costumes” query - we show it as the #1 result on the search page.

 

When the user intent is less direct, we'll inject the results in lower ordinal and give suggested links from our Deals Channel.  Here's another example: for the query “sears”, we show the Deals Channel link on the top, and the coupon and deal unit in lower ordinal.

 

 

In order to further help users, we use our proprietary Zoom Related Search technology to give query suggestions. Below, see an example for the query “printable coupon", where we give Money Saving Searches for related queries on the top right panel.

We hope you enjoy Ask Deals – just in time for the shopping season at the end of a tough 2009.  We’re excited about this special, seasonal vertical that will be available through the end of the year, and perhaps beyond, if our users love it. We think they will, and we look forward to your feedback.

Thanks for reading – and ‘asking’ for savings! We’re happy to deliver.

- Ankur Choksi,
Director of Search Technology, Ask.com

Ask.com Celebrates the 25th National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Today, commemorating the first day of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask invites people everywhere to honor loved ones affected by breast cancer by posting a tributes on our homepage.

Our special, one-day homepage memorial is part of the Ask.com Search for the Cure® program and a way to show support to Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. The homepage will continuously change throughout the day as tributes are added in honor of survivors, those living with breast cancer, and in memory of those lost to the disease.

This year, 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease touches all of us in some way – it’s a risk every mother, sister, daughter, and wife must face. If you know anyone who has been affected by breast cancer, please go to Ask to honor them today. 

We designed the tribute to virtually bring everyone together who has been affected by the disease, because if we stand and fight together, we can make breast cancer history.

Sincerely,
The Ask.com Family

Searching for a Cure: Ask.com and Susan G. Komen for the Cure® Partner in the Fight to End Breast Cancer

Today we are excited to unveil our Ask.com Search for the Cure® campaign, a first-of-its-kind donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure® – the world's largest and most progressive grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists fighting to save lives and end breast cancer forever.

This year, 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease touches all of us in some way – it’s a risk every mother, sister, daughter, and wife must face.

Inspired by Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker and her remarkable story, we’ve created an easy, engaging, and cost-free way for consumers to get involved and generate funding that is crucial to breast cancer research and education.

Simply visit Ask.com, choose a Search for the Cure skin, answer the breast health questions, and Ask donates. More details are in today’s announcement.

In celebration of the 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the U.S., and in loving memory of family and friends lost to this devastating disease, we’re urging all Americans to join the fight to end breast cancer forever by searching for the cure on Ask.com.

Sincerely,
The Ask.com Family

  

SES San Jose is here! August 10-14, 2009

It’s one of our favorite events each year, and Ask is proud to support SES San Jose as a premier sponsor. We’re also joining our industry colleagues on several panel discussions that will explore the industry’s most pressing topics, and we hope you’ll stop by to take part in what’s sure to be lively and insightful dialogue. Here’s the line-up:

- Tuesday, 10:30-11:30 a.m. – Ask’s research and analytics guru Carla Borsoi will discuss the future of search marketing on the Search: Where to Next? panel.

- Tuesday, 1:45-2:45 p.m. – Dr. Tomasz Imielinski, EVP and search industry veteran, will share his in-depth expertise on semantic search technology on the Don't Call it a Comeback: Semantic Technology and Search panel. Afterward, Tomasz will hold a casual media briefing in the press room from 3:00-3:30 to discuss his upcoming Ask technology projects. We hope you’ll stop by to ask questions and spend some time with Tomasz.

- Wednesday, 9:00-10:15 a.m. – at the panel on Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations, Ari Levenfeld of Ask Sponsored Listings will discuss keyword strategies. 

- Thursday, 10:30–11:45 a.m. – Ari will be back to share his insights and strategies for optimizing paid search at the panel on Advanced Paid Search Techniques.

- Thursday, 12:45-2:00 p.m. – Tami Zhu will discuss the latest in mobile search applications at Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps.

We’ll also be mingling during the networking reception in the exhibit hall on Tuesday from 5:30-6:30, where we look forward to putting faces with names and answering questions. Or stop by the Ask booth and check us out – Ask is hiring in several areas of expertise, and we’d love to tell you more. 

We look forward to seeing all of our industry friends and colleagues next week!

-- The Ask.com Team

What makes a search engine “semantic”?

Recently I took part in a panel discussion at SemTech 2009 on the timely topic of “semanticity” of search engines. In the last few years, many "semantic” search engines have been launched, and the term “semantic” has become open to broad interpretation and use due to the lack of defined industry metrics. It’s a question I’m often asked at conferences: “What qualifies a search engine as semantic?” Is the use of some Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies sufficient to award such a definition? When can a user say that the search box really understands his or her queries in the same way another human would?

In a new paper entitled, “If You Ask Nicely I Will Answer – Semantic Search and Today’s Search,” which I’ve co-authored with Alessio Signorini, we propose a family of metrics to evaluate the semantical invariance of search engines, and we report experimental results for well-known search engines. I will present and discuss this paper at the IEEE Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2009) this fall in Berkeley.

Here is an abstract of our conclusions, and let me start with an example from our IEEE paper: 
 
Imagine a four-year-old as a human search engine…

Let’s suppose that search engines had the intelligence of a four-year-old child. If that is the case, one could just imagine the following dialogue taking place: 
 
User: How is the weather in Hawaii at this time?
Engine: I do not know.
User: What is the weather in Hawaii islands right now?
Engine: I don’t know!
User: OK, “current weather in Hawaii”
Engine:  How many times will you ask the same question?  I told you already, I have no idea!!

Even though that human search engine is entirely clueless about the status of the weather in Hawaii, it is nevertheless semantic: it knows that it does not know. But it does understand that the user keeps asking the same query, although differently phrased.

Humans recognize quickly that two questions can really be simply a different phrasing of the same one. Yet search engines most often don’t understand this.  And until they do, they cannot properly be called semantic.  So, “Top 10 songs”, and then, “Top ten songs” bring different – albeit still relevant – results. But they should not…

It’s not the technology you use, but the effect which you achieve…

How invariant search engine results are under rephrasing (paraphrasing, extra hints, etc.) is, to us, a reflection of how semantic the search engine is.  

It is largely irrelevant how semantic invariance is achieved (i.e. which search technology is used: NLP, statistical analysis of query sessions, etc).  What matters is the final effect.  If semantic invariance is poor, users have to work harder… or – in human terms – they must “ask nicely”. But what that tells us is that search engines are not doing the work they should be.  They are not bearing the burden for the searcher – which they should be.  I believe this can be measured – as we propose in our IEEE paper – by massively testing semantic invariance.

To this end, we propose simple metrics based on the entropy of the results that a search engine returns for clusters of semantically equivalent search queries.  We can measure the overlapping of results (are they stable? does a different URL move to the top if you just ‘ask differently’?).  Does an “ORA” (one right answer), such as “who won the Super Bowl in 2006,” become impacted by how you actually phrase the question?

Here are our conclusions, which we provide in more detail in our IEEE paper:

1. First, the invariance of results for general search queries is still poor. Today’s search engines are very sensitive to the way queries are actually phrased. They are all mostly keyword-based, and far away from simulating human query understanding. 
 
2.  Second, search queries with a “One-Right-Answer” for popular subjects (such as the Super Bowl query) appear to be  well served by today’s search engines, which manage to return the correct answers in their result pages with surprising  invariance to the form or manner of the query.  Unfortunately, this is most likely to be a Pyrrhic victory to today’s engines – because this success is most likely a consequence of the massive redundancy of information on the web.  There are multiple pages talking about the same “facts” in different ways. For topics of massive interest (e.g. the World Cup) many people create pages with the same or similar content. The subtle differences on the language and structure used to present this information help search engines to deliver at least one copy of the information through simple keyword matching.

The recent widespread adoption of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques also plays an important role in this challenge. While those techniques are unfortunately often associated with spam, their original intent was legitimate: help search engines to do a better job while indexing and ranking page contents and URLs.

A truly semantic search engine would take care of invariance at the query level, clustering together all its possible rephrases into one unique concept to each answer, and would deal equally well with popular and unpopular topics (from the World Cup to, say, a small local soccer league in Quito, Ecuador).

The data we collected also confirms that the stability of results under rephrasing for general queries is still poor in all the major search engines. Our experiments with simple numeric synonym replacements (e.g. “10” with “ten”), as well as the ones involving the addition of redundant category terms, indicate the heavy reliance on text matching.

The keywords used in the queries, and their position, strongly influence the distribution and the order of the results returned. This is unacceptable in a semantic world of advanced search engines, where the common goal must be to lift from users’ shoulders the burden of “asking in the right way” to get the right answer.

There’s much more on semantic search you’ll be hearing from me and from Ask in the weeks and months to come.  You can pick up a copy of our paper at IEEE to see what else we found… and look for it here too on the Ask Blog.

Thanks for reading,

Dr. Tomasz Imielinski
EVP, Global Search and Answers

Thanks, iPhoners! Dictionary.com Makes Apple’s List of 30 Favorite Apps

The Apple® App Store just turned one year old and Dictionary.com is joining the party!  We’re humbled and happy to make the list of Apple’s 30 Favorite Apps, compiled in a special iTunes section to celebrate their first birthday milestone. We realize that with more than 60,000 apps to choose from, this is no small-time kudos, and our app wouldn’t have seen the great success it has without all of you.

It’s been three short months since we introduced our free application for the iPhone™ and iPod touch®. Since then, we’ve reached 2.3 million downloads and we currently hold the #2 spot in the reference app category.

(Credit: Apple)

Congrats on a successful year, Apple App Store. And a big thanks to all of you for your support of the Dictionary.com app. Now, who’s ready for some cake?

--The Dictionary.com Team

Harvesting the Best Answers from Ask.com’s AnswerFarms!

Earlier this year we blogged about Ask.com’s AnswerFarm™ technology – our proprietary method of crawling and extracting question/answer pairs from hundreds of thousands of sources, including user generated content, FAQ pages, news/blog articles, and structured/semi-structured data. Our Q&A database has quickly become one of the largest and most useful Q&A collections on the web – an efficient and interesting way to “see” the chatter taking place across the web about all kinds of topics.

Today at SemTech 2009 in San Jose, we’re excited to announce that our Q&A database has grown from 100 million Q&A pairs to more than 300 million in just a few short months. What’s truly significant about this milestone is the quality of our Q&A pairs. Our semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance enable us to determine when we have multiple questions that all semantically mean the same thing, so we can aggregate those Q&A pairs, filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats, and thus find the most relevant answers.

Simply put, when a consumer asks us a question, our goal is to provide the best answer, the first time, every time.

As we’ve grown topical coverage and improved relevance, we see continual improvements in user frequency, retention, and loyalty within the Q&A channel and when consumers are exposed to Q&A pairs within standard web search results. Below are examples of our Q&A channel, as well as how we’ve added useful Q&A pairs into our web results pages. 

"how do I train a puppy" :

 

"is poison ivy contagious" :

"the most abundant elements" :

"difference between dextrose and glucose" :

  

So take a look and try it for yourself. We hope you enjoy the fruits of our ‘farming’!

- Dr. Tomasz Imielinski, EVP, Global Search & Answers
- Lingkun Chu, Director, AnswerFarm and Search System

P.S. – Catch Tomasz at SemTech 2009 at the Executive Round Table: Semantic Search panel, at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California at 8:30am PT today. Later, he’ll hosthave a media briefing at 1:30pm PT in the Terrace Room, Ballroom Level at The Fairmont. Come and say hello…and if you ask a question he’s certain to have an Answer ;)