Ask.com Reinvents Itself with a Focus on Community Q&A

The beta version of Ask.com comes with a new interface and is designed to provide a more semantic search experience. It includes a Q&A product that pulls from 500 million indexed questions and answers and queries appropriate Ask.com users for their answers. It will be released to users on an invite-only basis beginning today.

As opposed to the traditional engine, Ask.com has always been centered around serving up relevant answers in the form of links to queries in the form of questions. The new version of the site is meant to deliver real answers, as opposed to just links, and introduce a community element to deliver human answers to subjective and complex questions.

The beta offering is a product of four new features: a completely overhauled look with a focus on highlighting trending questions from the community, semantic search with answers displayed on the page, a large Q&A database and a user community element that targets members for answering questions based on their areas of expertise. The latter somewhat mirrors Aardvark's formula for finding answers to user questions, and is initiated when users click the "Ask the Community" button on the right-hand side of the results page.

Ask.com currently only accounts for 2% of the search market in the United States, which equates to 184,518,000 total searches for June 2010, according to Nielsen data. As such, the new direction to socialize and transform the search experience is one that makes sense for the company, but something that seems a bit tardy in terms of the question-and-answer online revolution already underway.

In 2010, we've seen the traditional Q&A site model flipped on its head with the success of Aardvark, now owned by Google, the buzz around Quora and the anonymous approach of user-to-user Q&A that Formspring

Ask.com is confident in their altered approach, though. "The evolution of our search technology, the rapid growth of the social Web and the shift in consumer search behavior are propelling Ask to the forefront of what we believe will be a multi-billion dollar Q&A category," says President Scott Garell.