Bigmouthmedia Search Engine News: /ask/

Ask.com scales back search, focuses on answers

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:49:00 GMT

Long-standing web portal Ask.com, originally designed for answering plain-language questions for the internet populace, will return to focusing on its old intents after an announcement yesterday confirmed it's now out of the search business.

Doug Leeds, president of the United States arm of the company, confirmed the move in an official blog posting for the company, explaining that Ask has been pouring its resources into the search market for the past few years, and seeing very few successes.

He said the company had been criticised for losing focus in its operations in recent years, and current management have been realigning the company's priorities.

"Unfortunately, this absolute focus means that we need to stop investing in things outside of providing users with the best answers, including making the huge capital investment required to support algorithmic web search development," he said.

"This investment in independent web search is not required by our strategy, nor is it required in the marketplace."

The search community is sure to see the move as a bow to Bing and Google, whose market domination ensured Ask hasn't enjoyed a relevant share of the search pie in a long time.

Speaking to the BBC, Ovum senior analyst Mike Davis suggested Bing may actually come to power search functions for Ask, replacing the in-house team.

"Microsoft is making some very good deals at the moment, licensing Bing to other people," he said. "It has invested a fortune in search and wants to start knocking at Google's 65 per cent market share."

In the coming months, Leeds said, Ask will cease operations in Edison, New Jersey, and Hangzhou, China, shedding a reported 130 jobs in total.

Leeds' statements make the company sound optimistic for its future in the web sector, describing the question-and-answer service area pioneered by the company as "hyper-competitve."

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Google prepares to shake up the search engine market

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:49:00 GMT

Search behemoth Google still leads the way in the US search engine market, according to comScore's August 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings. But while the Mountain View giant's grip may be slowly loosening, competitors have been slower to catch up than in previous months.

The digital market analyst revealed that Google accounted for 65.4 per cent of all search queries last month - a 0.4 per cent fall from July's figures as the combined forces of Yahoo! and Bing slowly nibbled away at its user base. However, the slide may be less significant than analysts had hoped for, in the month that saw Bing take control of Yahoo! searches.

Figures were more drastic in terms of total core search share, which saw Google sites lose 1.1 per cent of traffic last month, gained by the combined force of Yahoo! sites (0.9 per cent) and Bing (0.2 per cent). However, Google was still found to handle 10.3 billion searches, only a minor drop from the previous month.

While Google's decline may be slowing down, the Californian company is clearly not sitting still and waiting for the Bing-Yahoo! juggernaut to steal its user base. With a number of major changes sweeping through the search landscape this month, it remains to be seen what effects the radical revamp of Google Instant will have on transatlantic users.

Plucky search engine underdogs Ask.com and AOL LLC Network remained relatively static across the months, holding on tightly to their 3.5 and 2.2 per cent market shares respectively.

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Ask.com rebrands as social search engine

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:25:00 GMT

Stalwart search engine Ask.com has unveiled its new look to the public, returning to its Q&A roots by supplementing search algorithms with human assistance.

The new website aims to provide a solution for web users seeking urgent or more reliable responses to tricky questions not available on the internet by incorporating social networking features that allow people to submit queries directly to other users.

In an official blog post, Ask.com explained: "Today we've officially launched the public beta for the new Ask.com, which 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."

In its beta form, users can only access the service through invitation. By offering "the capability to pose questions to real people", the new Ask.com aims to answer "those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can't address."

This rejuvenation of the somewhat struggling search engine - which currently ranks fourth in the US search market with a 3.6 per cent share, according to comScore - may allow it to distinguish itself as a viable alternative to the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Or, as the blog post puts it: "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."

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Google to take-over ‘Social Search’ engine Aardvark

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:01:00 GMT

Google's social networking capabilities are once again set to expand. Following on from the release of Google Buzz, Google's very own social network, the Mopuntain View giant is now to take over Aardvark in a deal said to be worth around $50million (£32million), according to TechCrunch.

Aardvark, the original 'social search' engine, was established in 2007 in San Francisco by former Google employees. The concept was to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to tap into the knowledge of friends and friends-of-friends and create a search function with added friendliness to better serve the searcher.

This is not the first time Google has attempted to compete with question-and-answer sites such as Ask.com. In 2002 the search company launched Google Answers, which was later shut down in 2006 due to the "community's limited size". Yahoo! later launched its Yahoo! Answers site. Aardvark hoped to update the question-and-answer concept to make full use of the global obsession with social networking.

Ask.com is currently the market leader in the sector, with over 1million hits a day. Aardvark's average number of hits is just over 3150 hits with the majority being from mobile access, so theoretically as mobile internet uses increases exponentially so too will Aardvarks hits. Aardvark representatives put this trend down to the idea that users are looking for quick, straight to the point answers on their phones without having to hunt for them. The recent news that Facebook beat Google to the punch as the most visited site for smartphone users may have helped remind Google just how essential users find their social media fix too.

The deal, expected to be made official in the next few days, only confirms how seriously Google is taking its latest attempts at conquering the social networking industry.

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Software vender's chart shows disturbing search trends from children

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Security and parental control software maker Norton has published a list of top searches in 2009 for children under 18, under 12 and under 7. Alarmingly all age groups searched for porn.

Norton's summary of the aggregate chart explains that YouTube, Google and Facebook topped the list but that sex and porn searches made the top five. On average, however, kids spent most of their time in 2009 searching for music (30% of the time) and then for movie/tv related terms (12% of the time).

Michael Jackson was the most popular celebrity and starlet Taylor Swift was in second place. Kids searched for eBay, Walmart and Best Buy among popular retail brands.

Kid's Top 10 Searches of 2009

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. Porn
6. YouTube.com
7. Yahoo
8. MySpace
9. eBay
10. YouTube

Norton, who sells software to help parents regulate what their children are able to view online, split the searches out by gender. YouTube, Google and Facebook remained in the top three searches for both boys and girls. The girls spent nearly twice (42%) of the time searching for music than the boys (22%) but the boys spend more time (13%) on adult terms than girls (2%).

Boys Top 5 Searches of 2009

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. Porn

Girls Top 5 Searches of 2009

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Taylor Swift
5. Sex

In the last analytical split Norton looked the searches children had conducted at an age group level. The security vender used three age groups: teen (13-18), tween (8-12) and 7 & Under.

In this analysis Norton discovered that tweens and teens spent most of their time searching for music but children under the age of seven spent most of their time (23%) searching for games. Norton noted that kids under the age of 7 would search for games at P2P sites such as Limewire and Mininova.

Teen (13-18) Top 5 Searches of 2009

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. Google
4. Sex
5. MySpace

Tween (8-12) Top 5 Searches of 2009

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. Club Penguin

7 and Under Top 5 Searches of 2009

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Porn
5. Club Penguin

For some people the results of the Norton study will be alarming. Are children under the age of 7 really searching for porn that often? Facebook's has a minimum age for sign up that this search trend analysis seems to suggest is being flaunted.

While it is worth keeping in mind Norton sells software to reassure parents that their children will not be able to access inappropriate sites should we ask whether there are inaccuracies, such as automatic virus-fuelled searches or the 'wrong' user being recorded at the PC, that might be responsible for these search trends?

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Rupert Murdoch demands Google must pay

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:12:00 GMT

At a recent meeting in Beijing, media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a zealous speech in which he claimed that search engines must pay for the right to link to content on news sites.

Mr Murdoch appears to be no large fan of Google and co. as he frequently takes the chance to lambast the Mountain View giant, alongside other search engines like Microsoft's Bing, for what he calls "stealing" their web content and linking to it on their search engine result pages. According to the media colossus, search engines are thieving stories in order to shamelessly make money.

Joining Mr Murdoch was fellow news executive Tom Curley, who said at the conference: "We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission."

Mr Murdoch added: "The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content.

"But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators - the people in this hall - who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph."

However, what Mr Murdoch appears to have neglected to recognise is the small matter of how search engines like Google play a crucial role in driving huge amounts of traffic to news websites. The links displayed in the search results lead directly to the news site, displaying adverts only placed there by the website itself.

It is possible to remove a website from Google indexes quickly and easily. Whether Mr Murdoch will lead the way in doing so by taking News Corp associated sites out of the search sphere remains to be seen - but it is likely that this removal, rather than search engines, will see a more crippling effect.

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Ask Deals service finds the best consumer bargains

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:25:00 GMT

Determined to retain its modest share of the search engine market, Ask.com has introduced a new service aimed at guiding users to the best discounts online.

Ask Deals browses online stores to find sites offering coupons and other discounts, compiling a database of more than 1 million offers which is then manually edited and organised. The New York Times reports that the Ask Deals service will be automatically activated when a user enters a query into the Ask search engine containing relevant terms such as 'bargain,' 'cheap,' 'coupon,' 'discount' or 'sale.'

President of Ask Networks, Scott Garell stated: "I think this is something that is going to resonate with Americans given where the economy is at this point in time." Mr Garell explained that the service aims to provide users with a central hub for finding the best deals online without having to scour sites manually.

Ask.com has been struggling to stay relevant in the search engine market by responding to consumer interests, a turbulent journey that saw them drop their iconic butler mascot in 2008 only to revive the Ask Jeeves moniker earlier this year. But this latest foray into online discounts may prove a hit, particularly as the use of coupons has flourished in the recession.

Ask Deals will face tough competition from dedicated coupon and price comparison websites however, as well as their major search engine competitors who already earn a substantial part of their advertising revenue from product searches, with services such as Bing's Visual Search being directly geared towards online shopping.

It remains to be seen whether Ask Deals can improve the company's stake in the search engine market, which has remained relatively static in recent years. comScore figures of the US search engine market for August 2008 found that Ask.com held a modest 3.9 per cent market share, compared to 64.6 per cent for Google, 19.3 per cent for Yahoo! and 9.3 per cent for Bing.

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

The third wave of search?

Tue, 12 May 2009 08:48:00 GMT

The first wave of search saw a battle between two fundamental ideologies about how to catalogue the web:

User moderated by a human editor - used by the likes of DMOZ and Yahoo Directory
Computer indexed - used by the likes of Google, Altavista and AllTheWeb, who utilised brute computing power tempered by a little human QA

In the end the latter won hands down and Google proved to be the best of the bunch. The human moderated approach found a new home in blogging and social media; a much more distributed and democratic form than the old web directories (anyone who ever tried to debate with a DMOZ editor will attest to this!).

These in turn again got indexed by those brute force engines. These days, arguably the greatest achievement of the Web 2.0 world - Wikipedia - has usurped DMOZ in Googles affections as the human edited resource of choice.

The second wave was more subtle and it is still happening right now. Ask was probably the first off the mark, but soon everyone was at it; finding relationships and aggregating similar stuff together. So a search for, say, a band would return a mix of fan pages, lyrics and official information, all carefully identified and differentiated.

On Google you can now expect to find for any given search term a demarcated mix of news, shopping, local, web and other results. In fact, the very notion of a simple, ranked SERP seems to be disappearing before our eyes. You might be tempted to think that that is the end of the story - the future of search as we know it.

And to a certain extent you'd be absolutely right - intelligently grouping data together is the Executive Summary of the search world. It works and it's hard to beat. Its current zenith could well be Googles shopping search, which intelligently gathers prices, web crawled and Google Base content plus reviews together in one handy service.

However, all of the above have one flaw; they can only give you examples of what you're looking for if exactly what you want already exists somewhere out there on the web.

Let's say you're looking for a graph of population figures for Iowa for last 5 years. Google can only provide you with one if someone has already created such a graph and helpfully tagged it up and described it well enough for Google to find it on a web page and return it for your search. If there is nothing like that out there waiting for you, well ... tough. You'll just have to get out the graph paper and draw it yourself.

That was, perhaps, until now.

Up to now only humans could take existing information, infer from it and maybe synthesise new conclusions; just like when your friends know what you like (existing information) and buy you something you'll find interesting for your birthday (synthesise something new - an idea for a present).

Its not quite as easy as it looks, as anyone who has been stuck for a present idea will attest. Even we humans aren't so great at it. It's one reason why all adult males have too many pairs of socks and jumpers.

But, starting slowly with Amazons "people who bought this..." feature, recommendation engines are catching up. Now, engines like Likaholix (created by two Google engineers Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan) or last.fm can make pretty accurate inferences given the right data. Google's personal search is also toying around with these same concepts.

But that's still not the future. If I want a graph of the population of Iowa, I don't want to be offered a graph of crop yields in Arkansas instead, because that's what other people like me we looking for.

What I really need is a search engine that can synthesise new information from what it already has to hand to answer my exact question if there isn't a exact answer readily available. Now that would be the future. That's what the all-knowing computer in Star Trek does. That would be the third wave.

So, can computers make those kind of inferences? Well, Alison Pease of the University of Edinburgh (UK) has developed an AI program called HRL ( http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk / apease / research / hrl.html ) in which software agents select and brainstorm inferences from any information they are given. And its pretty smart. For instance, HRL independently formulated a famous mathematical proposition called Goldbach's conjecture all by itself. OK, so we humans beat HRL to it by 250 years, but it's no less remarkable for it.

Does that help us with our Iowa graph? We're getting closer; in April, Stephen Wolfram - famous for software application Mathematica - unveiled Wolfram Alpha, a search engine that can answer quite complex questions by building answers from other, unrelated data sets.

For instance a query such as, "What is 25 million dollars in 1945 worth in 2008?" would not trouble Wolfram Alpha at all.(The answer, depending on your luck with your bank of late, will be anywhere from 300 million to - *ahem* - zero.)

And our Iowa query finally gets answered too, without fuss.

Whats interesting is how Wolframs approach takes us all the way back to the beginning of our story; their solution takes 150 full time expert "editors" to manually feed the data into Mathematica (but from there onwards, the system them does all the intelligent combining and inference without human assistance).

We can't help thinking that if we could just combine Googles reach into books, web sites and public data, its incredible ability to intelligently collect, group and combine data into sets with Wolfram Alphas ability to make inferences, we really would have a killer combination.

And possibly Wolfram think so too; Wolfram Alpha will launch - just like Google did - with a commercial API. That will allow other companies - maybe even other search engines - to process their data with Wolframs technology. And then the possibilities are literally endless. I for one can't wait to see what they come up with.

In the meantime, want to try Wolfram Alpha for yourself? Its launching any day now... go take a look at www.wolframalpha.com

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Search engine Ask Jeeves is back

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:12:00 GMT

Following UK market research that revealed brand identity was 83 per cent stronger with Jeeves, Ask brought the butler out of retirement, a mere three years after ditching him.

The YouGov poll revealed that a comparatively low 72 per cent acknowledged brand awareness from Ask.com and, on the basis of such conclusive findings, the company decided to reintroduce its search mascot.

Since his re-emergence from retiral, Jeeves has undergone a significant change of appearance - most notably gaining a dimension - although he still boasts the rotund characteristics of P.G. Wodehouse's famous servant.

The relatively quick turnaround and re-emergence of the original brand has had many questioning Ask's motivation and whether it is continuing to seek a way out from beneath Google's shadow in the search engine market.

Ask Jeeves offers users a service not dissimilar to Google's and has struggled to define itself in the search market - much like AOL, MSN and Yahoo have - battling for a stake in the remaining 10 per cent market share afforded by Google's dominance.

However, Ask.com's Managing Director Cesar Mascaraque refuted this. Telling the BBC: "We have seen a growth of 20% this year, so we are not struggling.

"We have been focused on developing an outstanding producer that will deliver outstanding results and Jeeves is just the icing on the cake.

"Our aim is to give our users the answers they need for the lives they lead and Jeeves's role is to give our users answers in a more human way."

Ask Jeeves' key remit is to offer answers to more specific questions, as well as provide additional information and suggested search options to users of the service.

The Jeeves character will appear only on the UK site, but US and other worldwide users can access him via uk.ask.com.

Mr Mascaraque told Search Engine Land: "Our users have emphatically told us that they find Jeeves enhances their search experience - adding character to what can otherwise be a very functional experience. They see Jeeves as approachable and trustworthy and, above all, helpful."

In terms of brand awareness, Peter Matthews - brand expert for Nucleus - identified Ask's troubles to the BBC: "Ask without Jeeves lacked character and while the actual product - searching the web - is very effective, in trying to be more like Google they shot themselves in the foot.

"Not only have they got a brand issue, but they need to be famous for answering questions rather than producing reams of search results."

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia

Google's top searches down under precede year-end Zeitgeist

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:12:00 GMT

For search lovers, the announcement of Google's year-end Zeitgeist - a regular feature on its annual calendar since 2001 - is an eagerly anticipated event. The list reveals "the sign of the times" - i.e., the most popular searches conducted on Google throughout the year - and tends to act as a barometer of our interests and pursuits over the past 12 months.

Mountain View is yet to release its global Zeitgeist for 2008 but if you're looking for an appetite whetter, this year's hottest search topics in Australia and New Zealand have been announced. The top ten Australian searches for the year aren't much to look at: "games" tops the list, while "Sydney", "YouTube", "MySpace", "Facebook" and - that's right - "Google" follow behind.

But, as with Google's global Zeitgeist, it's when the list gets broken down into categories that it becomes really interesting. The fastest rising Australian search term this year was "iPhone" - a distinct overlap with last year's global fastest rising search term. The most searched for TV shows included Big Brother, The Simpsons and Heroes, while the most searched for movie was perhaps unsurprisingly Baz Luhrmann's "Australia", with The Dark Knight pipping Indiana Jones to second place. Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt also lost out to Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice in the top ten most popular Olympic-related searches.

However, unlike Yahoo!'s top searches for 2008 - in which Britney Spears and World Wrestling Entertainment beat American president-elect Barack Obama to the top positions in the US - Obama came first in the top ten most searched for celebrities down under, with Britney relegated to fifth place.

The top searches on google.co.nz this year aren't too different to those in Australia, with "games" once again topping the list. However, the fastest rising searches of 2008 in New Zealand do show some significant differences; "iPhone" doesn't even get a look in, with "Olympics" in first. Other variants include the "Large Hadron Collider" and the "Jonas Brothers".

In an overlap with one of Yahoo!'s hot trends for 2008, Aussie actor Health Ledger was the most searched for death this year, while Britney took another drop to sixth place in the most popular celebrity searches in New Zealand. Obama wasn't top of this list either - instead it was US R&B heartthrob Chris Brown.

So can Australia and New Zealand's most popular searches give us an indication of what's to come from the Google Zeitgeist for 2008? Obama is certain to be a prevalent figure, as is former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. And if Google's Zeitgeist for 2007 was anything to go by, we can certainly expect the search engine to find a new and innovative way of presenting its year-end report to its legions of followers. Watch this space for more news on the Google Zeitgeist for 2008 - or, if you're feeling impatient, satisfy your daily appetite for statistics with Google Trends.

Digg | delicious | Reddit | Google | Twitter | Sphinn | StumbleUpon | YahooBuzz | Facebook | Mixx | Contact bigmouthmedia