It's Here! The New Ask.com!

After months of hard work, late nights and truckloads of energy drinks, we launched the new Ask.com today and we're really excited about it. This launch continues our leadership in search innovation by delivering on our users' core needs of relevance, streamlined user experience, and fast page loads.

Our goal is to deliver the best answer to you, the first time, every time. We know that is a difficult goal and no search engine can always deliver with that precision 100% of the time, but we think we're getting closer and closer to the 'bullseye'. We also believe you will agree once you've tried out our new version.

Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience, and we push further down that path today with the introduction of three new answer technologies:  DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm. These technologies take both structured and unstructured data, and - instead of delivering a title and description for each document - they deliver answers.  Here’s an example.

Let's say you just got a new pet snake and you were wondering how often it will shed its skin.  Here is how other search engines would present a result to your search "how often do snakes shed their skin?":

Not too informative -- and how can you be sure the page really answers your question? Well, here is how the new Ask.com will present this result to you:

There you go -- your answer, front and center.

We have answers for all kinds of searches. Want to know what a good credit score is?  Try it out: What is a good credit score?

Or maybe you need to learn a new bike trick: How do you do a wheelie?

   

Or you need to find out what it will cost you to send all those Miley Cyrus fan letters you’ve written: Postage stamp price

I could go on and on, but instead of reading more - how about just giving the new Ask a test drive? We’ll post more about all the new and exciting additions to Ask.com over the next week.

Thanks for giving us a try.

Erik Collier
VP, Product Management