Ask Specializing Blog Search

Ask has about 6% in US market share in terms of search volume and is currently the 4th largest search engine to serve its own search results, behind the 3 giants Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Ask, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, was initially founded in 1996 in Berkeley, California and was the first commercial question-answering search engine in plain English or natural language on the Internet.

Ask was bought by IAC Interactive Corp in 2005 for $2.3 billion.

On 27 February 2006, Ask rebranded by dropping Jeeves, hoping that the switch would draw more attention to a series of improvements that it introduced in recent years including the acquisitions of Teoma, Bloglines and other technologies.

In June 2006, Ask has rolled out a new blog and feed search capability that combines the best features of both Bloglines and Teoma.

Unlike many blog and feed search services which use specialized crawlers to identify content in the blogsphere environment, Ask uses the data it has collected from subscribers of Bloglines to identify blogs that people have actually subscribed to.

Ask then uses the number of subscribers to a particular blog as a proxy for popularity, instead of the most common method in which blog popularity is determined by the links to the individual blog posts.

Ask also uses the Expert Rank which is a category-specific technology it has been evolving since its purchase of Teoma back in 2001 to fine tune its search results.

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