Webware

Ask isn't giving up on efforts to expand its niche in the search market, this time hoping that coupon clippers will make it their search destination of choice.

Ask Deals is expected to launch Tuesday, blending links to coupons from a plethora of online coupon aggregation sites alongside search results for certain types of queries, such as "cheap jeans" or "plasma TV deals," said Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks. There will also be a link to a Deals page off the Ask.com home page, which will have a "deal of the day" type promotion as well as links to other opportunities for savings.

The company had noticed that searches for coupons on Ask increased 50 percent in 2008 compared to 2007, likely a result of the state of the economy, Garell said. But it thought it could do a better job organizing and presenting those coupons than the dozens of coupon sites have done to this point, with the added benefit of having additional information about the product come up within search results.

Ask's index is drawing from about 40 coupon sites, crawling some sites and partnering with others to bring the coupons to the service. It is also overseeing the coupon aggregation with a team of employees tasked with sorting out coupon quality.

It's safe to say that even with signs of an economic recovery surfacing, as long as the unemployment rate remains high there will be a fair amount of people interested in scoring a deal. It's less clear whether that will motivate those people to give Ask a try as their primary shopping search engine.

Despite a very public ad campaign with Nascar this year, Ask lags Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft by a wide margin according to ComScore's latest figures on the search market. And its share has actually dropped since last year, from 4.5 percent of the search market in July 2008 to 3.9 percent in August 2009.

Ask.com is still fighting for a piece of the search market, hoping that Nascar dads can give it a leg up against Google, The Intimidator of search.

Dale Earnhardt's car was No. 3, but Ask.com is No. 4 in the search market, trailing Google, Yahoo, and Bing among active searchers. Still, Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks, believes that his company can grow its presence in search as the market comes around to Ask's longtime strategy of presenting Internet search as a series of questions and answers.

"We spend a lot of time figuring out how we can answer questions better than everybody else," Garell said. Ask thinks that the rise of semantic search--the idea that a search engine will understand the intent behind your query, not just the keywords--complements its approach to presenting search results.

All major search engines are examining different ways of presenting search results with semantic technology in mind. The idea is to allow queries to be presented in a more natural format instead of a series of keywords, and to present results with different types of data--pictures, graphs, videos, and the like--rather than page after page of search results.

Of course, the quality of your search results only matters from a business perspective if people use your site to conduct searches and click on an ad every now and then. This is a fundamental question for everyone whose brand is not synonymous with the verb "to search": Yahoo says it attracts searches from the massive traffic it enjoys on its myriad properties, and boosting that traffic will boost searches. Microsoft is spending millions of dollars to market Bing as a superior search experience.

In hopes of standing out among the crowd, Ask.com has turned to perhaps the most brand-saturated audience in America: Nascar fans. A Nascar race is a moving billboard of the top consumer brands in the world, but search engines are quite underrepresented among that audience.

Ask.com sponsors a car ( No. 96, Bobby LaBonte) and signed a deal to be the official search engine of Nascar and Nascar.com. During the telecast of a Nascar race, the company also inserts questions relevant to the race situation into the leaderboard crawl, hoping to drive television viewers to their laptops to search for the answers to those questions.

Is it working? Garell says the volume of search queries processed on the site has grown since February, the start of the Nascar season, but Ask.com's traffic is flat on a year-over-year basis, according to ComScore's May data. The company has been on a media tour of late, talking up its Nascar strategy in hopes of building buzz around the site.

But the ongoing battle for Ask.com will be staying relevant as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all add semantic technology to their searches and continue to build on the strength of their own brands, which might require the IAC company to find something new in the search world to stand out from the pack. Garell hinted at upcoming announcements around real-time search and mobile search, two areas of search that are still relatively up for grabs as they evolve.

It's hard to see how Ask.com can break out of its niche, but the company is certainly trying something different in the search market, which always bears watching. Old habits die hard, however; the company has brought back Jeeves the butler in the U.K. in response to popular demand.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--If those chasing Google have anything to say about it, search on the Internet is going to become more about a conversation than an exchange of keywords.

Panelists from the four major search engines--Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com--joined Web search start-ups TrueKnowledge and Hakia at the Semantic Technology Conference to discuss the rise of semantic technology as the engine behind the still nascent Internet search industry. Semantic search, or the idea of divining a user's true intent from how they enter their queries and how Web data is structured, is an unfamiliar concept to the majority of Web surfers who tend to think Internet search is actually pretty good as it is.

It's not, according to Tomasz Imielinski, executive vice president, global search and answers at Ask.com. "Most users don't know how good search can be," he said, drawing an analogy to those who were satisfied with their portable music options until the iPod came along.

The W3C is devoting an entire week to the concept of semantic technology, which involves Web publishers and search engines working together to structure data in a way that can be presented in a more appealing way than the "ten blue links"--a dirty term in the search industry these days--with which most searchers have grown familiar.

Yahoo has been banging this drum for a few years, introducing products like Search Monkey to help Web publishers start organizing their content around semantic standards, said Andrew Tompkins, chief scientist at Yahoo Search. "Today on any major search engine, you'll see structured information about a restaurant," he said, basic things like phone numbers, address, or maybe a link to a map of its location. All of those things require agreement on standards to make it happen.

But semantic search is also about improving the ability of search engines to analyze the meaning of plain text on a page, said Scott Prevost, general manager and director of product at Microsoft's Powerset division. A search engine that knows how to take a query and produce exactly what a person is looking for on the first page of results will prove attractive over time, he said.

The goal of all this work is to make search more intuitive, more like asking a friend or colleague a question, said Riza Berkan, CEO of semantic start-up Hakia. "We believe search is going to move to more conversational techniques," he said.

That's music to Ask.com's ears, of course. The company announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million question and answer pairs in its database that Imielinkski thinks provide context around searches.

But none of this work on semantic technology has done anything to dislodge Google from its position atop the search world, which actually grew a bit stronger over the past month according to ComScore. Google's Peter Norvig acknowledged the benefits of semantic technology and agreed that Yahoo deserves credit for pushing semantic technology along. He drew applause from the several hundred attendees at the panel discussion when he discussed Google's decision to support RDFa semantic standards, announced last month at Searchology.

Still, there's an economic component to this debate that Google isn't quite buying. None of the panelists brought this up Wednesday, but last year Microsoft's Prevost admitted that the desire to make an end-run around Google's dominance of keyword-based search advertising is what has driven semantic technology research, at least to a certain degree. "If people aren't bidding on keywords, and are bidding on concepts, it could completely change the ball game," he said last August at the Search Engine Strategies conference.

To that end, Norvig argued Wednesday that the idea of conversational search is good for people who aren't quite sure what they are looking for, or who don't quite understand a certain topic. But those who do grasp a topic and want a fast answer are much more likely to use keyword searches, he said.

Corrected at 3:49 p.m.: This post originally misstated the title of Ask.com's Tomasz Imielinski. He is executive vice president, global search and answers. Corrected on Friday, 11:35 a.m., clarifying the W3C did not sponsor the conference.

Maybe all our refined, enlightened interests are lost in the long tail, because Britney Spears once again was the most popular search subject in 2008 on Yahoo.

For Yahoo, Spears wasn't the only pop-culture icon in Yahoo's top 10 searches. Also on the list were Miley Cyrus at No. 4, Jessica Alba at No. 6, Lindsay Lohan at No. 7, and Angelina Jolie at No. 9.

Apparently a lot of people are curious about World Wrestling Entertainment, because WWE was No. 2. The online game RuneScape was No. 5, anime series Naruto was No. 7, and American Idol finished in 10th place on Yahoo's list.

Yahoo also broke down searches for various other subjects. For economic searches, the top 10 list started with IRS stimulus checks, then followed with oil prices, gold prices, gas prices, Dow Jones, Sallie Mae, stock market, AIG, foreclosures, and debt consolidation. The list reveals that people use general-purpose searches for everything ranging from how-to advice to the latest news.

In the people of politics, President-elect Barack Obama led the list. Next came Sarah Palin, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mitt Romney.

AOL also shared its top search terms for 2008, though it didn't break out overall terms.

Ask.com also spotlighted popular 2008 searches, and has a few variations on the standard search categories. Its top questions are as follows:

1. How do I get pregnant?
2. How do I lose weight?
3. How do I write a resume?
4. How much is minimum wage?
5. How much is my car worth?
6. How do I change my name?
7. What is the meaning of life?
8. How do I register to vote?
9. Why is the sky blue?
10. How do I download videos?

And since Ask.com bought Dictionary.com earlier this year, it's releasing top search terms for that site. People's vocabulary expansion efforts concentrated on these terms: maverick, socialism, economy, recession, radical, cyclone, solace, realtor, environment, and potholes.

Apparently Google, which has shared search trends on its annual Zeitgeist list since 2001, didn't get the memo to release its results Monday, but expect it to cough up some new results soon--and, I hope, some of the accompanying graphs.

Ask.com is cleaning up its act a bit with the latest (the 11th, I'm told) major update of the search engine, which launches on Monday.

The biggest change is that Ask is parsing more data from various sources and displaying that in its search results. If you ask Ask a question, the algorithms will try to give you an answer in the result pages, not just a link to a relevant Web site. Ask.com president Scott Garrell confirmed that, yes indeed, this is the premise that Ask was founded on in 1996 when it was Ask Jeeves, but back then the answers were hand-crafted. Today they're created by the engine.

The company is also mining the Web for "Q&A pairs," and displaying answers from any site where people ask questions and others answer them. The site will also display questions related to the one the user asks, as well as the answers to their question, to help them do further research on a topic.

The service is also displaying more structured data in its results, such as TV listings and events.

Garrell claims that Ask 11 is 30 percent faster than Ask 10 as well as more accurate in its results. It's also a bit more cleanly organized, but you'd have to put the old and new version side-by-side to see the difference.

Parsing search results instead of just displaying them in a list is, of course, not unique to this engine, but I do like the focus on displaying answers instead of just links.

See also: Search interfaces of tomorrow you can try today.

Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.

Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.

But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.

Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its photo, video, and Web searches, and some of Ask.com's text and display ads will be shown on Photobucket. No financial specifics were mentioned.

"Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day," said Andrew Moers, general manager of partnerships for Ask, the No. 4 player in search. "This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points."

Photobucket sister company MySpace, meanwhile, has its search (and many of its ads) handled by Google. But on that note, Google has provided ad technology to Ask.com since the dinosaur days of 2004.

Just how much does Ask.com own the word "Ask?" Enough to have a problem with a question-and-answer site called "Askpedia," apparently. Representatives from the start-up Askpedia.com told CNET News.com that the search engine's parent company, InterActiveCorp, sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this month, citing intellectual property violations in the name "Askpedia."

"(This) is likely to cause consumer confusion, particularly inasmuch as Askpedia purports to provide online informational services that are substantially similar to those provided by Ask," the letter dated March 13 reads. "In using and incorporating Ask's intellectual property in this manner, Askpedia is falsely suggesting a connection between Ask and Askpedia, and thereby misappropriating the substantial good will associated with Ask's trademarks."

IAC representatives were contacted to verify the contents of the cease-and-desist letter, but were not immediately available for comment.

Ask.com's trademark on the name was first filed April 28, 1999, when the company was still known as Ask Jeeves and had not yet been acquired by the Barry Diller-helmed IAC in 2005. These days, the search engine has been undergoing a restructuring process in order to handle its tepid market share.

The letter, signed by Edward T. Ferguson, IAC senior vice president and general counsel, and provided to CNET News.com by Askpedia representatives, goes on to request that Askpedia "cease and desist from all use of Ask's trademarks and other intellectual property, including without limitation in the name 'Askpedia' or any similar formation using the word 'ask,'" and agree not to do so in the future.

A deadline of 10 days was provided, meaning that IAC would presumably seek legal action after Sunday, March 23.

Yong Su Kim, CEO of Askpedia, which describes itself as "a knowledge marketplace for questions and answers" and awards cash prizes to the best answers, said that his small start-up has about 100,000 registered users. He sent an e-mail to CNET News.com in which he speculated that "our guess is that their lawyers have nothing better to do."

Kim continued, "Either that or they're working on a Wikipedia-like service and want the domain name and trademark."

As expected, Ask.com is cutting 40 jobs--8 percent of its work force--as part of a restructuring to refocus the search company toward providing answers to its core audience of women searching on entertainment, health, and reference topics, the company said on Tuesday.

"Today, we unveiled a new direction for Ask.com," Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Safka said in a statement. "Moving forward, we will focus on our core customers, and what they come to Ask.com for most: answers. Our loyal base of 45 million unique users come to Ask.com for answers at a rate that is three times more than any other major search engine."

Meanwhile, the company said it will be hiring some new employees to help with the transition, as well as add more community-generated responses and look for partners. Teoma will remain part of the search technology, the company said.

The reorganization, Safka's first move since assuming the CEO spot from Jim Lanzone in January, is aimed at helping Ask.com grow its market share from the current 5 percent. Competing head-on with the Google and the others hasn't narrowed the gap, so the idea is to focus on a core demographic and answers to questions, specifically.

Given that Yahoo laid off more than 1,000 workers last month, Google is suddenly looking at some surprising slow growth in paid search ad numbers, and Microsoft is looking to buy Yahoo to better compete in search and ads, it's not such a surprise that the No. 4 search engine would be hitting snags of its own.

Although, Ask.com has undergone more cosmetic surgery than most, changing its name from Ask Jeeves, dropping the butler logo, redesigning the site numerous times and shaking up management along the way.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoffs.

Ask.com has quietly launched a news page called "BigNews" that aggregates top news stories from a variety of sites ranging from The New York Times to small blogs.

The company, whose parent company InterActiveCorp is having troubles of its own over plans to split off its different brands, enters a crowded field with more established news aggregators like Yahoo, Microsoft, and even Google, as well as sites like Digg and Topix.

Ask.com says the news page stories are dynamically generated based on freshness, source authority, social media references, article content, and multimedia availability. You can use a source filter to search for stories based on geographic region and track stories via the site or RSS.

The top stories on the site Thursday afternoon were Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney dropping out of the race, the Shuttle Atlantis launch, U.S. Defense Secretary defending NATO's mission in Afghanistan, two studies concluding that biofuels are not so green, and a Utah couple and their dog rescued after being stranded for 12 days in the snow.

By contrast, Romney, Atlantis, and a story on a baby found alive amid the wreckage of a tornado in Tennessee led on Yahoo News, which was similar to news on the MSN and AOL portals. Google News led with Romney, mob raids in Italy and the U.S., and a standoff between police and a gunman in Los Angeles.