For Ask.com, what is old is new again.
Starting Tuesday, the search site that refuses to die is re-reinventing itself as a question-answering service. This time Ask.com is adding a Web 2.0 twist on its origins as a site that promised to understand what you were asking and provide the one right answer.
Ask.com rose to dizzying heights in the original dot-com boom when it was known as Ask Jeeves. Its stock rose to more than $300 a share a few months after its 1999 IPO, before quickly plummeting in the inevitable crash to less than a dollar -- risking being delisted from NASDAQ. Seeing the rise of Google, the company ditched its editor-powered results for a smart alogrithm and introduced a bevy of innovations later copied by its bigger rivals, including Google.
With those innovations, Ask.com rebounded a bit, retaining a distant fourth place in search. That isn't a bad place to be -- given the company still ranks in the top 10 of internet properties, above eBay and Amazon in terms of monthly visitors.
But now question-centric services are hot again, including the long-running Yahoo Answers, the hot new start-up Q&A site Quora, the Google-purchased Aardvark, the test-message-focused Cha Cha and Facebook's rumored social network–based question-answering service.
In short, Ask.com realized that fortune had miraculously returned the company to the catbird seat.
The company's formerly unavoidable commercials -- featuring an animated version of P.G. Wodehouse's famous valet Jeeves -- turned out to be so enduringly persuasive, that despite the company's retirement of the mascot years ago, people still think of Ask.com as the place online to get questions answered.
Oddly, that held despite the fact that the hundreds of young liberal arts graduates the site originally relied on to build an answer database had long since been laid off.
"When you ask people what site to use for asking questions, we are No. 1," Ask.com President Doug Leeds said in a phone interview. "We have had more questions in one day than Quora has in its lifetime."
The revamped Ask.com now uses algorithms to answer questions, returning an answer as the top result, without requiring a click-through. Traditional style search results are also returned beneath the "answer."
And now, as a backstop, the site is offering a way to ask a question of a community of volunteer Ask users who answer questions in minutes -- which are fed back to the searcher through e-mail and mobile apps. Ask.com volunteers are only sent questions relevant to subjects they say they are interested in, and answers are added to the index of known answers, so that volunteers aren't asked to repeat their answers again.
It's a lesson learned from Wikipedia and similar sites -- people are willing to share information when it comes to something they are expert in.
"We found that if you ask people questions they have some knowledge about and the answers aren’t Google-able, you get to the sweet spot," Leeds said.
"If were to get a question about what geocaching (Leeds' secret hobby) is \, I'm not going to answer that question," Leeds said. "Go Google it.
"But if you ask me what's the best GPS unit to use in a rural environment or an urban one, I have an opinion to share," Leeds said. "Let’s take this great knowledge and let it be reused until it gets stale."
Leeds said the site is using semantic technology to keep users from answering basic questions, such as "Who does Kobe Bryant play for?" while routing real questions that can't be answered using a search engine. So a question such as "Will Kobe Bryant be able to build a dynasty?" goes to registered Ask.com users who have said they are Laker fans.
In a test of the site today, I asked, "Does aid to developing countries promote dependency?" Within minutes, there were two, paragraph-long answers, including one that mentioned a recent Wall Street Journal story on the topic.
Ask is trying to avoid the pitfalls of Yahoo Answers, which has users competing to get on the user board, thanks to a point system, according to Leeds. At this point, Ask.com community members aren't paid or rewarded, though some ceremonial "badges" a la FourSquare may appear in the future.
Leeds says the new direction has re-energized the company, which was purchased by media-and-technology giant IAC in 2005 for $1.5 billion.
"We sort of lost our way," Leeds said, referring to its attempts to chip away at Google's 70 percent search share. "People were saying 'Please help me answer my question. If I wanted links, I would go to Google.'" He added that Ask.com users ask, proportionately, five times as many questions as they do of Google.
Other examples Leeds pointed to were questions such as "Is it possible to raise a disciplined child by never yelling?" and "What can I do in Homer, Alaska? I don't want to go fishing." The latter question refers to one of the best fishing spots in the world, making it very difficult to find any information not about fishing through a typical search. But an Ask.com community member suggested a number of other possibilities, including a boat trip to a remote island where one can see bears in the wild.
The Ask Q&A community -- and the ability to direct questions to it, remains in beta. You can request an invite, or be invited by a current member. Over the coming weeks and months, more and more Ask.com searchers will be able to direct questions to the community to increase the number of answers.
Beta aside, Ask.com users, and even Google users, will start to see answers in their search results (even if Google gets the Ask.com answer to this query better than Ask.com does).
It's a great strategy -- perhaps the best that Ask.com has ever come up with, and it's a testament to the company's unwillingness to say die, when nearly everyone in the tech community wrote them off for dead.
Disclosure: I worked for Ask.com as a Q&A editor for less than a year, post-IPO in 1999 and 2000. I never made any money on its stock and no longer hold any stock in it, or any of its competitors.
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