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 [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: Employees | Ask: General | Ask: Web Search

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 [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: Employees | Ask: General | Top News

I just got word that the co-founder of Teoma, the search engine Ask.com acquired to power natural search, Apostolos Gerasoulis has left Ask.com. Apostolos Gerasoulis was the executive vice president of search technology for Ask.com. If you look his Linkedin profile you will see his current position is no longer being at Ask.com. Here is a screen shot: Apostolos has been the force behind all the search technology deployed at Ask.com for the past years. Him leaving is another major let down for the future of Ask.com's core search technology. Most of you know my thoughts on Ask.co [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Employees

Ten days ago, we reported that Antonio Gulli left Ask.com after 4 years heading up their technology team in the European R&D center. Gulli announced his new plans are to continue in search, but switch ships and work for Microsoft Bing. Gulli said he will be "leading all the engineering development for UX and verticals in Europe," focusing on Microsoft Bing's search technology and user interface. He will be working at Microsoft's London site of STC Europe nearby Carnaby Street. What I found most interesting about his announcement post was that he, in not so many words, explained that he [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Ask: Employees | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: Employees

The next Ask.com personality to leave Ask.com is Antonio Gulli who was hired about four years ago to lead up the technology team in the European R&D center. Antonio announced he is leaving and explained what he worked while at Ask.com. He worked on: Image Search News and Blog search Video News Search DailyBeast Core Web Search Infrastructure RealTime Fresh Web Ranking Core Frontend Platform for UK Here was Antonio's bio prior to joining Ask.com: Antonio was the creator of the first Italian Search engine in 1998, Arianna, and he was CEO/CTO of Ideare (sold to Tiscali S.p.a. in [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Employees