But Ask’s Q&A app wasn’t intended to support full-blown conversations. Cut to several months later and, just in time for the SXSW conference, Ask is launching a new app focused on local conversations. It’s called Ask Around.

Location awareness on the phone immediately puts people into the middle of a local conversation. All comments are public by default so you chat with people around you, whether you know them or not. The geographic radius of the conversation can be adjusted by a slider on the app, up to 15 miles. So you can see what’s being said immediately around you or more broadly on the metro level.

People outside the designated area cannot participate directly in conversations but they can “listen” in on conversations wherever they may be happening. For example, you could be in LA and listen to conversations happening at or around the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at a particular event or in Manhattan more broadly. This is one of the most intriguing dimensions of the user experience.

There are obvious parallels here to Twitter and group chat applications. But the Ask app is specifically designed for conversations around specific places (yobongo is another that does this). The app also allows users to save locations and then come back and later follow conversations in a particular area.

You don’t follow people, you follow places.

Ask said that it isn’t monetizing the app in any way at this point, just “putting it out there” to see whether and how people interact with it. If it doesn’t fly Ask will retire the app. However there’s also a possibility that the company could have a real hit on its hands.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This makes sense given that the needs and interests of most mobile users are more immediate than their PC-using counterparts. According to a now frequently repeated Microsoft/Bing statistic: 70% of mobile search tasks are completed in one hour (vs. one wk for PC).

Here are some of the (verbatim) top-level findings from the Ask/Harris study:

–66 percent of mobile users said they are more likely to ask timely questions when they are not in front of their computer.

–40 percent of smart phone users indicated they are more influenced by users’ opinions given within the last 24 hours than users’ opinions provided a month or so ago.

–While 55 percent reported interest in searching for local reviews on a mobile device, 68 percent reported a desire to know whether a restaurant is busy at that moment.

–By a landslide, smart phone users indicated that when looking for information on their mobile device they need it immediately (81 percent overall).

Ask has transitioned from being a “search engine” to an “answer engine” or answer community. In that context, it is arguably the most visible among numerous competitors, including Yahoo Answers, Facebook Questions, ChaCha, Quora and now quite a few others.

The company is making a serious bet that “Q&A” can be a differentiator for Ask and provide new appeal for the engine, which has seen flat-to-modestly-declining traffic over the past two years.

Ask has tried a number of things since 2008, after abandoning the innovative “3D” interface championed by former CEO Jim Lanzone (now at Clicker). None have really succeeded in moving the needle for the company, which has a stable core user base but can’t seem to generate new growth. Consistent throughout Ask’s history, however, has been the notion that its users frame their queries in the form of questions.

Ask President Doug Leeds told me that about 35 percent of all its search queries come in the form of questions. That is apparently 4X the number of “questions” the other search engines see.

Ask already has a huge database of “answers” that it can draw upon to respond to questions. The novel part is that it will be integrating community into search, by enabling users to send their queries to people in the community and receive an answer within 10 minutes (5 minutes is the ultimate goal). Answers will be delivered on the site, via email and eventually SMS I was told, making it a potentially valuable mobile tool.

The online landscape is already replete with Q&A sites and services. Here is an admittedly incomplete list:

• Aardvark (Google)
• Answers.com
• Askville (Amazon)
• ChaCha
• Facebook Q&A (not yet launched)
• kgb
• Quora
• Replyz
• Yahoo Answers (which just upgraded)

There are various, little-known free “ask a librarian” services from public libraries as well. Another site JustAnswer offers live chat with a subject-matter expert and charges a fee to users accordingly. This is similar to the structure of the now defunct paid Google Answers service that was shuttered several years ago. The kgb service also charges a small per-use fee to consumers but otherwise these are free services.

Ask sees itself as the only one among these services that can offer scale, sophistication and convenience. Yahoo Answers has scale, for example, but it’s not “integrated” into Yahoo Search, says new Ask Product Management SVP Tony Gentile, who came from vertical search site Healthline. Unlike several of the sites above Ask will have an “answer” for every question. The community is an adjunct feature to the search index itself.

There are a range of community features (that I don’t have screenshots of) enabling users to store their Q&A history and see other questions/answers offered by the community. I was told there will be a variety of methods to recruit and solicit community engagement. Interestingly there’s no Facebook or Twitter integration. (Facebook is currently testing its own Q&A offering.)

My conversation with Gentile and Doug Leeds yesterday led me to conclude that they’ve thought carefully about the new product and how to build their answer community. Execution is the key however. The question is: will the experience be good and interesting enough to convince people to use Ask more regularly vs. Google or Bing, which is also trying to provide “answers rather than links”?

Ask was unable to give me access to the site so I was unable to test it myself. However a hypothetical question I provided during the demo (“What should I do in Homer Alaska?”) elicited a good response from the existing database:

A comparable query on Google got a similarly good response, showing TripAdvisor as the first link:

Yahoo and Bing’s responses were also equally good, both showing Alaska.org as the first link:

This example illustrates the challenge; users comfortable with their search choices (Google, Yahoo, Bing) won’t necessarily see a reason to use Ask unless the Ask answers are better if not great — though the presentation of answers on Ask is differentiated.

Yet if Ask can build the community effectively, the integration of Q&A directly into search could prove to be a compelling feature and generate higher engagement and perhaps new usage.

The proliferation of all these human-answers services and the continuing identification of an opportunity in Q&A or “social search” shines a light on some of the frustrations and perceived inefficiency in search today. There’s a persistent notion that if one could only identify the right person or people a precise answer is waiting.

But when I said that no one had yet established a “brand” in the Q&A space, Leeds corrected me and said that there was already one — and it was Ask.

Yet coupons and deals have become progressively hotter during the recession. And now there are a growing number of sites online and in mobile that promise access to offers and savings. Sensing a differentiating opportunity, Ask is today launching a deals vertical (“Ask Deals“) within search that seeks to be that comprehensive source of coupons and offers from a wide range of sources.

Ask is largely crawling for the data and said the following in its press release about the scope of Deals at launch:

Ask Deals, its proprietary database of more than 1 million high-quality savings offers from national and local merchants across hundreds of product categories.

Ask Deals scours the Web for all the deals available online – from savings on ‘skinny jeans’ to restaurant coupons – and organizes the best money-saving offers front and center on the results page, eliminating the need for consumers to search multiple sites or multiple coupon sites or search engine links to find their answer. The Ask Deals database is continuously refreshed and editorially refined, giving consumers the most up-to-date and highest-quality savings offers every time they search on Ask.

Each of the major search engines now plays to some degree in the deals and coupons space. Yahoo has recently made a bigger push, while Google has seemingly neglected the coupon opportunity.

Microsoft offers an excellent travel vertical in Bing Travel (with price predictions and alerts) and provides cash back within shopping. The company also acquired the assets of local coupon platform Zixxo some time ago. And AOL, for its part, has one of the most interesting of the various deal/coupon initiatives in the little-known Shortcuts, which ties online CPG and grocery coupons to offline loyalty cards.

If you go into the iTunes app store you’ll find something like 30 apps that respond to the query “coupons.” Clearly this is an area that is growing and will be perennially popular.

To rise above the increasing number of sites and corresponding noise, Ask is betting on comprehensiveness, based on its ability to crawl the Internet and deliver a more effective and efficient search-driven user experience. I wasn’t able to try it out extensively before launch but my initial impressions are largely positive.

Here are some screenshots:

The underlying Dial Directions service is very good and easy to use, and Ask is the first of the major engines to offer WAP-based voice-search for directions. Live Search for mobile (the downloadable application) offers embedded voice for local search, but not for directions. InfoSpace FindIt (now part of Superpages) has voice output for turn-by-turn directions; so does the Mapquest Navigator client. And of course, the free directory assistance alternatives, to varying degrees, represent voice-enabled local mobile search.

Dial Directions may equally try and “white label” its service to others, so there may be similar offerings in the future.

Here’s a short video demo of the new service on Ask:

Ask Mobile with Dial Directions from xbrendanx on Vimeo.

This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

Why am I so bullish on mobile?

When mobile services become better known by searchers (that’s a large challenge) and used correctly (another challenge), they can offer something most people want more of. Time! It has been my experience when you can actually demonstrate to people how that can save time, you’re likely to make new friends quickly.

Increasingly, users can get the info they need with a mobile device without using a desktop or laptop computer. Just think how quickly we went from only business people and tech geeks having mobile or cell phones to what sometimes seems like everyone having one (especially noticable when you’re driving).

The next step fpr mobile search is for the masses (moms, dads, even grandmas) to gain access to useful information when and where they need it. Powerful stuff. I think search geeks often forget that many of the tools and resources that are second nature to us are still not known by many users. That’s important to remember.

Ask believes strongly in the future of mobile search. At Ask.com we began offering our Webby Award winning mobile service last fall at http://mobile.ask.com. This Spring Ask debuted a service offering GPS navigation and much more appropriately named, Ask Mobile GPS. Here’s an inside look at both services.

Ask Mobile

Ask Mobile loads very quickly and provides several services you don’t find elsewhere. More features and services are in the works. You can access Ask Mobile at http://mobile.ask.com (this works both on mobile devices and standard computers).

One of the most interesting things about Ask Mobile is that it’s carrier agnostic. While some mobile services are tied to specific wireless carriers, Ask Mobile will work on any mobile web browser from any web carrier.

Tip: You can always return to the home page by clicking the “O” key on your telephone keypad.

The main features of Ask Mobile are:

Web search. Results include some Smart answers, like weather, time zones and horoscopes.

You can also easily navigate to these and other features by selecting them from the home page of Ask Mobile. In other words, multiple ways to get to the same location.

Ask.com’s Zoom Related Search feature is also available to help users narrow and focus their search. Look for those suggestions at the bottom of the page.

Pages appearing in Ask Mobile search results that are not formatted for mobile browsers are made mobile friendly with page optimization technology.

One frequent question asked when someone sees the Ask.com Mobile home page for the first time is, “where’s the search box?” There isn’t one. Ask’s VP of Product Management, Doug Leeds, provided a review of some of the reasons why it’s not there on a post on Google Blogoscoped shortly after the product launched. It’s well worth a read.

Here are are key passages from Doug’s comments:

In general, we found, people search for the same type of information and use the same queries that they use on a PC. One very important implication of this is that, like on a PC, iteration is an key part of searching on a mobile device.

…unlike on a PC, there are constraints that make search iteration on a mobile device more difficult. For example, relatively limited bandwidth makes it much more time consuming to perform multiple searches. At the same time, a common way to solve for the bandwidth issue, reducing the number of results that appear on a single page, only exacerbates the problem because there are fewer results to determine how to refine the search.

Typing is another problem. On most phones (non smart phones), each letter can take multiple keystrokes. (An “R” is three strokes, an “S” is four.) This not only means tons of time typing but also many many more typos. Typos lead to poorer results and more iteration, meaning more time lost and more typing. It’s a vicious circle.

Removing the search box had the immediate effect of uncovering all of the other search tools we offer. (Tools we offer on our PC home page in a toolbox that gets much more viability on a PC monitor). These tools are designed to disambiguate queries. For example, instead of typing “weather in SF” users click and type only “SF.” On a normal phone keypad this saves 18 of the 25 clicks required to get a result (remember “r” takes 3 clicks).

On average, we saw a 25-40% decrease in the number of clicks to the “end point.”

Maps. In this map-crazy world you’ll notice that Ask.com mobile maps not only offers the actual street map but also aerial imagery. That’s right, aerial imagery on your mobile browser.

Maps can be manipulated by clicking arrow keys and you’ll find direct links to local listings “find nearby” and the option to send a link to the phone via SMS. Of course, entering a city without state info will offer up a list of options.

Aerial Examples for Mobile:

• Terminals at O’Hare Airport in Chicago
• Fenway Park in Boston

Directions. In my opinon, this is a key service for mobile users. Just like Ask.com on your laptop, we offer both driving and walking directions. It’s also a click to “swap” your beginning and ending address. Here are some cool things regarding directions:

Here’s a walking route from Michigan Ave to Wrigley Field in Chicago. Note both the ability to view the directions in list form or turn by turn with visual cues. Many pages also help the searcher resolve ambiguity by offering links labeled “All Matches.” For example, is it North Michigan or South Michigan Avenue?

In some cases, you will get visual cues (arrows and lines) that will even tell you which direction you need to go. You can always go to the first step (click 3) or last step (click 4).

Local business listings. You can send business listings to your phone via SMS, or just directions for getting there. Also, on many phones, clicking the phone number will actually dial the number located in the listing.

Image Search. Results offer three images per page. An option to send a link to the images to someone else via SMS is also available.

Blog Search. Ask Mobile offers a direct link to the Bloglines mobile search tool. It also uses Skweezer, a technology that takes ordinary web pages and renders them more mobile-friendly.

Other features available with just one or two keystrokes include: area codes, currency conversion, horoscopes, and time zones.

Like all search products, the best way to get to know it is by using it. Have some fun and become familiar with how mobile access to information will become just as important to cell/mobile phone users as being able to talk with someone on the phone.

Ask Mobile GPS

Ask Mobile GPS is a GPS-enabled application that features the best of Ask.com, Citysearch, and Evite.com. The service is available on a number of Sprint GPS-enabled phones and offers a number of location-based features including:

• Zoomable and scrollable maps based on your location
• Integration of contacts
• Location sharing: Find out where your friends listed in your address book are located. Tell them where you’re at. You choose which friends
• Access to CitySearch with reviews and info on nearby events
• Send and manage evites, online invitations to events
• Real-time walking and driving directions. This includes the both visual cues as well as voice navigation telling you to turn, go straight, etc.

You can read much more about Ask Mobile GPS (including screen caps) in this blog post.

Gary Price is Director of Online Information Resources at Ask.com. He is also the Founder and Editor of ResourceShelf.com and DocuTicker.com.

I’ve been testing Ask Mobile casually beside Google Maps for Windows Mobile, Microsoft’s Live Search/Local Mobile application and WAP-based Yahoo oneSearch, which just rolled out yesterday to a broad range of Asian countries.

This post offers some preliminary reactions to Ask Mobile based on an initial weekend of testing. One big caveat: I haven’t been able to test the sharing and social features, which are potentially most compelling aspect of the service, because Ask Mobile is not integrated with my contacts. (Almost anything in the application can be shared with your contacts.)

There are five modules or components currently on the application: contacts/sharing, directions, Citysearch, Evite, history/saved places. There’s also nice mapping integration with directions and local search results. Ask plans to integrate other IAC content, including Match, Ticketmaster and other properties in the future. As I argued on my personal blog on Friday, this integration of IAC content on Ask Mobile is more successful in some ways than online.

But there’s also an irony here: there’s no Ask. Literally, Ask is the overarching brand of a mobile portal where Ask Web search is missing; there’s no mobile Web search on Ask Mobile. Ask’s WAP site has mobile Web search and also offers the ability to sort local search results (from Citysearch) by rating, something not available on Ask Mobile but which would be nice to see in future versions.

The Sanyo demo phone I received has a traditional keypad and requires “triple tapping.” However, Ask Mobile attempts to minimize keystrokes through history, suggestions (which populate a list as a user types) and GPS. GPS is not, contrary to some reactions/perceptions in the market, a revelation that will transform the mobile experience. It’s a helpful feature that is very useful with driving directions and avoids having to enter location in many cases. (There’s a “near me” GPS option, which is also helpful for traveling or if you don’t precisely know where you are.)

The two features I used the most in my weekend of testing were Citysearch local listings and directions. I found the turn-by-turn directions, which are voice-enabled, to be quite helpful and generally accurate. They adapt to user location via GPS. There are also several useful directions options: fastest route, avoid highways, walking and advanced. Advanced gives users different choices regarding the presentation and delivery of the information.

The Citysearch listings are the only source of local information. By contrast, Ask City online is a broader local search application that incorporates data from Citysearch and other sources into results. Citysearch is a fairly comprehensive but uneven database of local business listings; it’s very strong in some categories and weaker in others. There were a couple of instances where I found business locations on the Google Maps application and in Live Local that I didn’t find via Citysearch.

One nice feature of Ask Mobile is a menu that allows me, once I’ve located a business, to read Citysearch reviews (although reading full-text reviews on a small screen is difficult), call that business, get directions, share the listing or save it.

It must be said that none of the WAP search tools or applications I’ve used are perfect. Google’s Maps application (unlike Google Maps online), for example, has no reviews or star ratings content to help me make decisions, although I love the maps themselves.

Ask Mobile will require a $9.99 monthly subscription service after an initial free trial. This is separate and apart, I believe, from any text messaging and/or mobile Internet access fees that the carrier charges. We’ll see if that flies. Company representatives at Mapquest, which currently charges a $2.99 monthly fee for its mobile application, have indicated they think the market is moving toward ad-supported models.

Mobile directions and navigation are a core feature and extremely valuable for mobile users. So people may be willing to pay something for that functionality. But $10 per month is a fairly high price point. Yet the mobile market is relatively segmented and will potentially support multiple business models.

As a bottom line assessment, in my 48 hours of testing, I found Ask Mobile to be a useful application with a few blind or awkward spots. But I anticipate those areas will improve over time.

More About Our Feeds

I’ll have more to say Monday when I’ve had a chance to play with the phone a bit more. I have a few screenshots on my personal blog Screenwerk.

Postscript: Ask has now posted details about the service in Ask Mobile GPS: The Next Level of Local.