Ask
Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom) is a search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original search engine software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.[2] Ask.com is currently owned by InterActiveCorp under the NASDAQ symbol IACI.
Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where “Jeeves” is the name of the “gentleman’s personal gentleman”, or valet, fetching answers to any question asked. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse.
The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language, as well as traditional keyword searching. The current Ask.com still supports this, with added support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions.
Ask.com headquarters in Oakland, California
In 2005, the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves. On February 27, 2006, the character disappeared from Ask.com, and was stated to be “going in to retirement.” The UK & Ireland edition of the website prominently brought the character back in 2009, however American visitors can go to the ‘askjeeves.com’ URL to see the new Jeeves as a ‘skin’, or background image.
InterActiveCorp owns a variety of sites including country-specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask Kids, Teoma (now ExpertRank[3]) and several others (see this page for a complete list). On June 5, 2007 Ask.com relaunched with a 3D look.[4]
On May 16, 2006, Ask implemented a “Binoculars Site Preview” into its search results. On search results pages, the “Binoculars” let searchers capture a sneak peak of the page they could visit with a mouse-over activating screenshot pop-up.[5]
In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature,[6] allowing users to opt-out from tracking of search queries and IP and cookie values. They also vowed to erase this data after 18 months if the AskEraser option is not set. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s positive evaluation of AskEraser[7] differed from that of privacy groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center who found problems such as the requirement that HTTP cookies be enabled for AskEraser to function.
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