San Francisco — Breaking a barrier from being a traditional search engine to reflect it brand name: “Ask” following the very recent trend, that is finding answers to your questions or problems. Well, according to Ask.com, they have the answer. At one of the search industry’s leading annual conferences, SemTech 2009, in San Jose, California, Ask.com took the wraps off its proprietary database of 300 million Q&A pairs for consumers in the United States and United Kingdom.
We know today for awhile that Answers sites are growing rapidly. For instance Bing, Hunch, and Wolfram Alpha to name a few are all striving to achieve the same goal of providing answers quickly to searchers.
Ask.com realizing the intent of searchers for answers, it comes as no surprise that Ask.com unfolded its proprietary core search technology in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance to filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats introduced in the fall of 2008.
The result is Ask.com achieved the industry milestone of 300 million high-quality Q&A database that is tweaked to give consumers the best answer, by crawling and indexing questions and answers from numerous and diversified sources across the web the first time, every time through streamlined, localized, concise results to their questions.
For example, the question “How do I train a puppy?” delivers in-depth answers with step-by-step instructions from a series of diverse and authoritative sources across the web — giving Ask.com searchers a selection of options and resources they can use to take action. Ask.com’s unique Q&A results also are injected and blended into standard web search results pages.
According to comScore, searchers type searches in the form of a question on Ask.com much more than they do other search engines.
Ask.com collected the data and then put into practice its semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance to filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats.
“Delivering the best answers though innovations in semantic search technology is the direction in which the search industry is headed, and Ask is best-placed to lead the industry in this regard given our database of hundreds of millions of questions, and our core search technologies,” said Scott Kim, Ask.com’s EVP of Technology.
To access the database, go to Ask.com and click on the “lots of answers” phrase above the search box. Enter your question and then click the blue “Search” button.
Else — if you have already searched your question in the regular results, look for the tabs under the search box in the top left corner and select “Q&A Beta.”
“With countless answers on the web, consumers face challenges in getting the answer they are looking for due to varied formats, redundancies, and junk answers. The Ask Q&A channel aims to cut through the clutter — and with today’s advancement, we are well on our way,” said Kim.