Ask.com

Posted on December 15, 2008

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Ask.com is a search engine started in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors. Ask.com is currently owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where “Jeeves” is the name of the “gentleman’s personal gentleman”, or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorensen), 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. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching.

On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character disappeared from Ask.com.

Ask.com owns a variety of sites including country-specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask For Kids, Teoma (now defunct), Excite, MyWay.com, iWon.com, Bloglines and several others. As of June 5, 2007 the site relaunched with a new, more simplistic look.

In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature, 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 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.

On July 4, 2008 Ask.com announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. Combined, the sites Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com had more than 28 million unique visitors in March, according to Lexico.

The company also operates localized services in UK (Ask.com UK), Germany (Ask.com Deutschland), Spain (Ask.com España), Italy (Ask.com Italia), the Netherlands (Ask.com Nederland) and Japan (Ask.jp).

Corporate details

Ask Jeeves, Inc. stock traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange from July 1999 to July 2005, under the ticker symbol ASKJ. At the time of the IPO in 1999, ASKJ had the third best first-day performance in history In 2003, it was the 51st best performing stock out of 3229 companies on the NASDAQ.[citation needed] In July 2005, the ASKJ ticker was retired upon the closing of the acquisition by IAC/InterActiveCorp, valuing ASKJ at $1.85 billion.