Ask.com the social search/Q&A engine is 15 years old. Founded in 1996 as Ask Jeeves by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen the company has launched a special social site to celebrate its birthday and review events of the past 15 years -- mylast15.com. Here's a brief recent history of Ask: July 1999: Ask Jeeves goes public March 2005: IAC buys Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion February 2006: Jeeves the Butler goes into retirement April 2006: Steve Berkowitz, head of Ask.com, leaves to join Microsoft. Jim Lazone named CEO of Ask June 2007: Lanzone launches innovative Ask 3D UI, which [...]

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The news broke yesterday that Facebook was getting a whopping $500 million from Goldman Sachs and existing investor Digital Sky Technologies at a valuation of $50 billion. None of this has been confirmed by the company but it's being very widely reported. Apparently the Goldman investment will enable the company's most wealthy clients to "get in" before an IPO and virtually guarantee that Goldman is the firm (or the lead firm) that takes Facebook public when that eventually happens. Groupon also just raised a gigantic funding round, between $500 million and $950 million according to reports [...]

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Reuters reports Barry Diller, the CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which bought Ask years back, is no longer the CEO of the company. Barry Diller recently gave up on Ask.com with competing with Google, turning Ask.com back into a Q&A site. Now Diller is the chairman and senior executive of IAC, and the current CEO of IAC portfolio company Match.com, Greg Blatt, will take over as the CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp. Part of this news is that cable company Liberty Media has bought out of the company, trading in their shares of IAC in exchange for $220 million in cash and Gifts.com and Evite, once [...]

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Talk about getting back to your roots. Ask.com, which originally used humans to find answers to questions, is going further back to its origins by abandoning its web crawling technology. The Need, Or Not, To Crawl Search engines like Google and Bing try to have answers to anything someone might search for by "crawling" the web, making copies of all the pages they find and storing them in a searchable database, or index. Ask has done the same thing since around 2001, when it acquired the Teoma search engine. Crawling helps ensure that you have a comprehensive index. However, crawling is an [...]

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A couple weeks ago, there were some rumors that AOL may buy Yahoo. This past week's Saturday Night Live's news brief skit with John Mulaney started off talking about that news bit. John Mulaney said, and here is the transcript: First up in the world of technology. I heard this week that AOL might be buying Yahoo. I love it! That is so sweet. It is like when two people in a nursing home start dating. They may not have much time left, but at least they have each other. I love it! You can watch the skit on Hulu, if Hulu allows you to. It is the introductory part of the sn [...]

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