September 11, 2006

Ask.com To Open R&D Center in Germany

Ask.com announced a new Germany research and development center to be headed up by Eric Heymann, former head of technology at Seekport, as director of global content acquisition today. The German R&D center will work closely with the Pisa, Italy, Campbell, Calif., and Piscataway, N.J. locations. Apostolos Gerasoulis, VP of search technology at Ask.com, said, "the expansion of our European research and development team will allow Ask.com to continue to develop and scale our world-class search." The full press release is posted below.

Ask.com Announces Research and Development Center in Germany

Eric Heymann, Former Head of Technology for Seekport, Appointed to Lead Hamburg Team

OAKLAND, Calif., September 11, 2006 – Ask.com, an operating business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI), today announced the formation of a new development center in Hamburg, Germany. The company also announced the appointment of Eric Heymann as director of global content acquisition for Ask.com. The former head of technology at Seekport, Heymann will lead the development team in Hamburg.

“The expansion of our European research and development team will allow Ask.com to continue to develop and scale our world-class search,” said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Ask.com. “In addition, we are proud of the appointment of Eric Heymann as the head of the Hamburg team, as he is widely recognized for his expertise in information retrieval, crawling technologies, Web algorithms and scalable systems. His many years of experience and expertise in search will prove extremely beneficial for our users worldwide.”

The Hamburg team will focus on global search technology research and development, working directly with the Ask.com R&D centers in Pisa, Italy, Hangzhou, China, Campbell, Calif., and Piscataway, N.J. Following the opening of the research center in Pisa earlier this year, this move continues to solidify Ask.com's presence in Europe, with recent site launches of Ask Espana, Ask Deutschland, Ask France, Ask Italia and Ask Nederland.

As director of global content acquisition for Ask.com, Heymann will play an important role in the development of core technologies that power the Ask.com search engine. Specifically, Heymann and his team will focus on crawling technologies to index global Web content, including Web pages, images, news and blog content, among others.

Heymann joins Ask.com from Seekport Internet Technologies GmbH, a search company focused on search solutions for consumers and B2B customers. At Seekport, Heymann was director of technology, Europe and responsible for the management of all technical professionals as well as all technology development for the company's numerous sites, including Seekport Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, UK and France. Prior to Seekport, Heymann was technical director, Search at Lycos Europe N.V., where he was responsible for all search brands and products across Europe. Also, Heymann is a co-inventor of Fireball and Paperball, two German-language search engines.

Heymann holds a master's of computer science degree with honors from Technische UniversitÃ€t, Berlin.

About Ask.com A leading search engine on the Web, Ask.com combines world-class search technology with one-of-a-kind search tools to help people get what they are looking for faster. Ask.com sites include Ask.com US (http://www.Ask.com ), Ask.com Deutschland, Ask.com Espana, Ask.com France, Ask.com Italia, Ask.com Japan, Ask.com Nederlands and Ask.com UK. Additionally, Ask.com syndicates its search technology and advertising units to a network of affiliate partners. Ask.com is a division of IAC Search & Media, a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI). Ask.com b-roll footage is available at www.thenewsmarket.com/ask.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:57 AM | Permalink

May 4, 2006

Ask.com France Launches French Blog

Ask.com has launched a French counter part to its English blog, at http://www.blog-ask.com/. Honestly, I cannot understand what the first blog post says, but it looks to me that they are just explaining what the blog will be used for, and they also mention a few other recent items about what is taking place at Ask.com. Visit, what I think is the first blog via top four search engines, written in French at http://www.blog-ask.com/.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:23 AM | Permalink

March 8, 2006

Ask France, Italy and Netherlands Launched

Ask.com has launched an expanded European presence with Ask France, Ask Italy and Ask Netherlands today. The Ask blog said that Ask France is sporting a "unique ranking methodology" that "provides better search results by identifying the most authoritative and respected web sites." Ask France also has some of the features of Ask.com including; Binoculars, French translation, and French Bloglines. In the future they expect to add news feeds, maps and itineraries, online shopping, downloads and other features to these properties.

Full Release:

Ask.com launches in France, Italy and the Netherlands

New Beta Sites Introduced to Help Users Find What They Are Looking for Faster, Better

OAKLAND, Calif. ? March 8, 2006 ? Ask.com today introduced the beta versions of Ask.com France, Ask.com Italia and Ask.com Nederland, representing the company?s most recent expansions in Western Europe. The beta search sites are available in each respective country at www.ask.com and can also be accessed directly from any country at fr.ask.com, it.ask.com, nl.ask.com.

?The unique search experience at Ask.com has resulted in the largest U.S. percentage growth among the major search engines for 2005, and we look forward to bringing that experience to more European users,? said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask.com. ?With the help of Ask.com, Internet users in France, Italy and the Netherlands will now be able to get what they are looking for faster.?

Following the launch of Ask UK in 2001, Ask España in 2005 and Ask Deutschland beta in 2006, the new sites represent Ask.com's commitment to establishing its brand throughout Europe. The Company plans to leverage the strength of its popular brand, its advanced technology, one-of-a-kind search tools, and partnerships with leading local content providers to grow share in emerging markets.

?The European search market is growing rapidly and, with differentiated search technology and a single-minded focus on meeting users? search needs, Ask.com is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that growth,? said Adrian Cox, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Ask.com Europe. ?We expect that the user adoption of our newly-launched interface, search tools and technologies, coupled with the Ask.com features that our users have come to love, will help Ask.com become a driving force in search across Europe.?

The beta sites utilize Ask.com?s proprietary algorithmic search technology, which ranks results based on popularity within topic communities on the Web, rather than simply by link popularity. This approach requires additional computations beyond that of other ranking methodologies that simply evaluate the popularity of pages on the Web at large. In addition, Ask France, Italia and Nederland include innovative features such as the Ask.com Toolbox, which provides customizable homepage shortcuts to tools including Image Search and MyStuff, the first personalized search service for saving, sharing, and organizing search results. The beta sites will also feature Binoculars, a preview tool that allows searchers to preview Web sites by simply mousing over the binoculars icon within their search results; Family Filter, a feature protecting users from viewing unwanted adult content; and Page Translation (initially only available on Ask France), which translates English-language pages into French.

About Ask.com A leading search engine on the Web, Ask.com combines world-class search technology with one-of-a-kind search tools to help people get what they are looking for faster. Ask.com sites include Ask.com US (www.Ask.com), Ask.com Deutschland, Ask.com Espana, Ask France, Ask Italia, Ask.com Japan Ask Nederlands and Ask.com UK. Additionally, Ask.com syndicates its search technology and advertising units to a network of affiliate partners. Ask.com is a division of IAC Search & Media, a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI).

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:36 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2006

Ask Jeeves Opens European R&D Center; Several Interesting Live Demos and Papers by AJ R&D Center Leader Also Available

We've been posting about several new R&D centers from Yahoo and Google in the past few week's and today we've learned that Ask Jeeves has opened an R&D center in Pisa, Italy.

From the announcement, The research center will serve as Ask Jeeves' European hub for search technology research and development, working directly with the company's U.S.-based research centers in Campbell, Calif. and Piscataway, N.J...The company recently launched two European Web search sites, Ask Espana and Ask Deutschland, with additional European launches planned later this year...Lead by Antonio Gulli, an expert in search engine technology and the creator of Italy's first search engine, Arianna, the Ask Jeeves European research center will support all of Ask Jeeves search sites, including the flagship Ask.com.

In April 2005, we blogged a quick entry about a paper Mr. Gulli was presenting at WWW 2005 Conference titled: A Personalized Search Engine based on Web-snippet Hierarchical Clustering (PDF).

Gulli's home page is not only home to a treasure chest of interesting reading, slide presentations, tutorials, etc. but also to several live web demos including:

+ SnakeT (Alpha) "Hierarchical Clustering Engine for Book, News, Blogs and Web-Snippets." This is the search tool described in the paper linked above.

+ ComeToMyHead: a News Search Engine with Images, Classification and Personalization

+ Comparison Engine: Find Your Own Rank on Many Engines

Postscript: Here are a few other papers that Gulli co-athored for WWW 2005.

+ Ranking Stream of News (PDF)

+ The Anatomy of a News Search Engine (PDF)

+ Building an Open Source Meta Search Engine (PDF)

+ The Indexable Web is More than 11.5 billion pages (PDF)

Posted by Gary Price at 2:09 PM | Permalink

January 25, 2006

Ask Jeeves Launches (Beta) German Site

It's official, but not a total surprise, since Barry first blogged reports about new European versions of Ask Jeeves appearing throughout Western Europe last month.

Today, Ask Jeeves has "officially" released Ask Germany (Deutschland) in beta.

You'll quickly spot an image of Mr. Jeeves on the home page but the service makes no other mention of the butler except this page with a history of the character.

Many of Ask's features available elsewhere are available on the German site including the binoculars feature, cached pages (with a date and time stamp), My Jeeves, and direct access to the German interface to Bloglines that also lists the number of unread messages in your Bloglines account on the AJ Deutschland home page.

Ask Jeeves Deutschland also offers an image search database and web page translation.

The main search box on the home page offer options to search only pages from Germany, only German language pages, or the entire web. This preferences page allows the user to change the number of results on a search results page and to activate the Internet filter. More about AJ Deutschland here. I was unable to spot an advanced interface page.

The official news release is here.

Germany has the greatest number of Internet users in Europe, with more than 42 million people online, and we believe it will be a very important market for the growth of Ask search technology and the Ask brand," said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Inc.

Last March, AJ/Ask launched Ask Jeeves in Spain and in 2004 Ask Jeeves in Japan. Btw, AJ is also testing their own Bloglines blog/feed search engine in Japan.

Finally, the SER post from December points to more European versions of AJ that haven't been officially released including Ask France and Ask Netherlands.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:58 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Ask Jeeves Drops "Jeeves" Part In France

We know that Ask Jeeves has promised a rebranding to come, with the smart money being on shortening the name to Ask and showing Jeeves the butler the door. Now Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable spots a Cre8asite forum discussion remarking how in France, it's simply Ask France -- not Ask Jeeves France. Barry also finds the same in Japan and Spain.

The French site went up earlier this month, as Abondance reports in French here. Still no sign of it being Ask With ExpertRank technology, however. We talked about how that might be coming here: Ask Jeeves To Rebrand Tech As ExpertRank Inside? As for the butler, while he might be out of the name, he's still featured prominently on the home page.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:00 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

MSN Powers UK's Times Online; Ask UK Scales Back Ads

Two brief items from the UK search scene today.

+ Revolution Magazine reports that MSN Search (MSN.co.uk) will power web search on the Times of London web site.

The six-figure deal will mean the Times Online Search the Web toolbar will be MSN branded, and will drive Times Online users to the MSN Search homepage. The placement will be fully integrated into the Times Online site and will run until June 2006.

+ The Netipmerative article: Ask scales back UK paid search ads, reports that Ask UK has done what we saw Jeeves.com do a few months ago and cut back on the number of ads on web results pages.

According to the company, Ask.co.uk will remove Branded Response and Answerlink ad products from the site as of December 31st.

The article also notes that Ask.co.uk has postponed its plans to offer their Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings in the UK.

Finally, Ask.co.uk is planning a "phased reduction" of their UK sales force between now and the end of the year.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:15 PM | Permalink

July 11, 2005

Ask Jeeves UK Begins Offering "Local Search" Services

Over the weekend I noticed that Ask Jeeves UK is beginning to roll out some local search services. You'll now find clickable links on the AJ UK homepage to driving directions and maps for the UK and Ireland. Both services are branded as part of "Ask Jeeves Local."

Posted by Gary Price at 12:49 PM | Permalink

June 20, 2005

SearchTeria To Power Mobile Search Ads On Ask Japan

SearchTeria Partners with Ask Jeeves Japan is a press release from SearchTeria announcing the company now has a partnership to put its mobile ads on the Ask Jeeves Japan mobile search site.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:07 PM | Permalink

May 20, 2005

Ask Buys Excite Europe; To Share Excite.com With Infospace

A Reuters article about 10 days ago mentioned that Ask Jeeves was planning on offering new services throughout Western Europe. These plans were made a bit clearer today when Ask Jeeves announced that they have acquired Excite Europe from Tiscali for an undisclosed sum of money.

From the news release: The acquisition of Excite Europe will extend Ask Jeeves' ownership of the Excite brand beyond the United States, giving the Company ownership of Excite's Internet domains throughout Europe as well as control of existing portal offerings in several major European markets including Spain, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

Want to discuss the acquisition? Check out this SEW Forums thread.

In other Ask Jeeves news, the company has agreed in a "comprehensive settlement of litigation" with InfoSpace to share marketing costs and revenue from the Excite.com Web search function.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:36 AM | Permalink

May 9, 2005

European Expansion & More In The Works At Ask Jeeves

Here are a few passages from a new Reuters article that takes a look at Ask Jeeves and their plans for growth as part of IAC.

Key Passages:

"It's kind of like the fourth period for us," [CEO Steve] Berkowitz said, using a sports metaphor for the last quarter in a game. "Come August or September we will have a great story to tell."

Priorities include international expansion, mobile and local search, personalization tools and features that help users zero in on the information they seek. After moving into the search market in Japan and Spain, Ask Jeeves this year plans to tackle the rest of Western Europe.

Berkowitz said Ask Jeeves would likely have some interesting tweaks on Web advertising in the future, but at least for the moment it is standing pat. "Right now, we have a great relationship with Google," Berkowitz said.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:30 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2005

Spain Says Hola to Ask Jeeves

Word that Ask Jeeves has just released a beta version of their new search service for Spain at: http://es.ask.com. The engine provides access to both web and image databases. Three radio buttons below the search box allow the searcher to limit their search to Spanish language content (default), sites from Spain, or the entire web. Like other AJ web search services, relevancy is determined using their Teoma technology.

Results pages look similar to what you see at Ask.com. They include links to cached copies of pages, links to the Binoculars "page preview" feature, and a clickable list of related topics. The MyJeeves personalization service is also available.

At the moment, there are no ads visible on results pages. An AJ spokesperson said the company hasn't made a deal yet with a paid listings provider.

Ask Jeeves Espana is AJ's third international property. Along with Ask Jeeves UK they also operate Ask Jeeves Japan which launched as a beta in August 2004.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:05 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2005

Ask Jeeves Still Plans to Expand European HQ in Ireland

A brief article in Ireland's Sunday Business Post reports that despite the IAC acquisition, Ask Jeeves is still planning to expand their European HQ in Ireland and develop services for the Irish market. No specifics were given. The Dublin area is home to the AJ editorial team. About six weeks ago we blogged that Yahoo has plans to add 400 jobs in Ireland.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:27 PM | Permalink

February 19, 2005

Ask Jeeves UK Gets Hello Celebrity Content

First, a brief article on the Revolution web site discusses a new deal that will allow Ask Jeeves UK to use content from Hello! magazine (celebrity news and profiles) for their Famous People Smart Search service.

Second, Ask Jeeves UK is providing search services on the Virgin Radio Toolbar

Posted by Gary Price at 12:20 PM | Permalink

January 18, 2005

An In-Depth Look at Ask Jeeves UK

The UK publication Internet Works has published an in-depth look at Ask Jeeves UK. The article is titled: The Butler Speaks. It features comments from Tony Macklin, Ask Jeeves UK director of product and Aylin Sakvan, VP of marketing.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:05 PM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

More On Ask Jeeves UK Gaining Personal Features

Gary blogged earlier about how Ask Jeeves UK has gained the My Jeeves personal features added to the main US/global Ask Jeeves site back in September. As I'm in the UK, I took a look to see how it works compared to the US side.

At either site, after you do a search, you'll see a "Save" link that appears below each listing. Click on that link, and information about the listing is saved to your "My Jeeves" area.

You can bookmark a link to this area (here's the US one; here's the UK one), or you'll find a link to it at the bottom of the Ask Jeeves home page in either country or at the top left-hand corner of search results pages. Once saved, you can search through things you've saved or organize results.

Though both Ask and Ask UK seem to offer separate personal search features, from what I can see, all information is combined. In others, if you search on Ask UK, save something, then search on Ask in the US and save something, both listings are saved in the same place. Going to MyJeeves in the US will still show UK listings you've saved and vice-versa.

The plus to this is that those who've already used the US version of Ask and saved material won't lose anything. The downside is that those who for some reason would like searches on the UK site separate from those on the US site can't do that.

For more about My Jeeves, see:

Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way from Gary looks more at how the feature operates, in terms of searching and saving.
Ask Jeeves Personal Search Goes Live from me looks at how you can use the service without registering, though you risk perhaps losing material if your cookies change.
MyJeeves FAQ has information about the service from Ask Jeeves. There's also a UK version of this FAQ, though they seem to be the same.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:45 AM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

Getting Closer to the Searcher

BBC Online takes a look at My Ask Jeeves (just launched on Jeeves UK) and Blinkx in the article: Search sites get closer to users.

"Blinkx users do not stop using other web search systems," he [Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder of Blinkx] said.

"They might use Google to look up a company, or Yahoo for travel because they know they are good at that," he said.

The variety of ways to search data was only helping users, said Mr Chandratillake and that it was likely that in the future people would use different ones for different tasks.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:21 PM | Permalink

December 5, 2004

My Ask Jeeves Comes to Jeeves UK

Ask Jeeves UK The MyAskJeeves "personal search system" is now available on the Ask Jeeves UK site.

MyAskJeeves UK offers the identical save, store, annotate, and organize services that are available on the .com site. MyAskJeeves launched in September on the .com site.

You can review what the MyAskJeeves and MyAskJeeves UK offer in our September overview: Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:33 PM | Permalink

November 25, 2004

Ask Jeeves UK Offers New Features

According to Revolution magazine, Jeeves UK is now offering four search features/tools that, until today, were only available on the U.S. site.

Now available at Jeeves U.K. + The Ask Jeeves Binoculars "page preview" feature More about Binoculars in this SearchDay write-up. + Dictionary Definitions + Movie Showtimes + Finally, The company has also introduced a more sophisticated system for its "related searches", which provide options for surfers to search on specific topics within their original search.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:34 PM | Permalink

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