by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Alphanumeric and punctuation based smiling faces have been popular on the Web and in text messages for years. Now search engine Ask likes and uses them too. A search for :-/ on Ask reveals that the emoticon typically means sceptical, uncertain or wry.Andrew Girdwood
In addition to emoticons Ask is also including a definition list of popular shorthand and acronyms such as "lol", "brb" and "rotfl". "Rotfl" stands for "roll on the floor laughing".
In addition to describing what the emoticon stands for the search engine provides links to web etiquette pages and lists of smileys where searchers can learn more about the form of internet shorthand.
Ask initially encouraged users of its search engine to ask questions rather than use keywords. This strategy complimented the search engine's offline advertising. Ask used the Jeeves butler character synonymous with PG Wodehouse' Jeeves and Wooster books to portray itself as the helpful and educated friend. With Google's dominance and internet users became increasingly comfortable with keyword and keyphrase searches Ask re-positioned itself to emphasise that the search engine dealt with both natural language and keyword searches. In February of 2006 Ask, under new owner Barry Diller, dropped the valet and re-branded from "Ask Jeeves" to simply "Ask".
Ask aggressively innovates to keep hold of its small but non-trivial market share in the search engine landscape. The popular Bloglines RSS aggregator is owned by Ask, as is the European side of the web portal Excite. Ask launched its own desktop search in December 2004.
The emoticon search results feature as part of the search engine's Smart Answers service. Smart Answers include a Movie search vertical, RSS and weather search. During the World Cup in 2006 Ask's Smart Answers feature used footballer's names and other keywords to trigger links to coverage of the games.
Google and Yahoo each offer definition search commands which can be used to look up the meaning of the text based acronyms. In relation to its market share, Ask is the first search engine to supply specialised results for smileys.
Writing on Ask's blog, the Smart Answers Team adds, "We plan on doing more with non-alphanumeric searching in the future".
