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.

However, Silicon Alley Insider today exposes the PR email outlining the plan:

On July 29^th, Ask will announce a brand new product aimed at delivering the best answers to people’s questions through a unique hybrid approach (think: a little bit search, a little bit social) that is not available on the Web today. As you know, the search landscape has evolved tremendously over the past few years and many search companies are attempting to tackle the Q&A space, but so far neither search nor social media alone as met this need.

With an avid userbase of people seeking questions (over one million questions per day; more than any other established or startup Q&A service online) and the best new technologies and products to meet this need, Ask knows that it is best positioned to capitalize on this opportunity online

In addition to Ask’s coming tool, there are a growing number of other Q&A/answer/help engines, including but not limited to:

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

However, none of these so far (we haven’t see Facebook’s) have quite “gotten it right” in my opinion. People sometimes also use Twitter as a Q&A tool.

Microsoft had a Q&A site that it shuttered a few years ago. And Google’s paid answers site was also closed several years ago.

Before we say anything more we’ll have to see what Ask produces and how it works.

For fun see the related 2006 post: Question & Answer Search Engines Ranked

In the meantime, Ask is doing and trying a lot of things to keep users and redefine its role in this new, contracting or consolidating search landscape. Most recently it made a major push into shopping with “deals search.” Another major initiative to soon gain more momentum and visibility is something of a return to Ask’s roots as a “Q&A” engine. (The picture immediately below is circa 2001.)

Ask, which has been highlighting “answers” for some time, is going to move more directly into social search or real-time Q&A.

Ask President Doug Leeds told me the other day that Ask still gets a huge number of queries formulated as questions. In recognition of that and the more recent rise of social and “real time” search, Ask will begin to enlist its community directly in answering questions and use a number of sophisticated algorithms around question routing and identifying trustworthy and authoritative answers and people.

If well executed it could be an effective strategy for the company (including in mobile), which despite many years of innovative efforts under former CEO Jim Lanzone was not really able to grow its share beyond 4 percent of overall traffic.

Q&A services have been around for quite some time, while “social search” and “real time search” are newer phenomena. We could identify a range of companies that are in one way or another enlisting humans to answer queries or questions. Beyond Yahoo Answers, Mahalo and others like them, there are Aardvark, kgb, ChaCha, not to mention Facebook and Twitter, that fall into these categories to varying degrees. And Google recently introduced “social search” seeking to bring humans more directly into search results.

Leeds said to me that almost nobody in the segment today is going to be able to do what Ask can do with social search/Q&A “at scale.” I think that the strategy makes a great deal sense for Ask. Whether it people ultimately use it will depend entirely on execution.

But that does not mean Google is not doing anything. They have partnered up with several organizations and companies to bring together a web site named Make History at 911history.org. The site has a storytelling sharing tool that uses the Google Maps API to display Google’s Street Views. It allows “people to place and then share their photos and videos in geographical context, collectively piecing together the history that was witnessed, one photo and video at a time,” Google said. The site is also hosted on Google’s cloud computing environment, Google App Engine.

On the logo front, both Microsoft Bing & Ask.com have used meaningful background images for their home pages. Here are pictures:

Clearly, the Yahoo home page has news and images for the day. Plus Gary Price at ResourceShelf has compiled a comprehensive list of how the Internet is remembering the day.

Our engineers were going to have to spend more time on improving efficiency, and less time on new feature development. So we’ve been in the planning stages for moving to new datacenter spaces since 2006, and we’ve executed the move of thousands of systems over the past several months . . .

We’re excited about our new infrastructure position because it supports new and innovative core search technology initiatives, and allows us to continually improve the vital basics such as speed, freshness and relevancy . . .

The idea is improved performance both for site owners/publishers and for end users.

Google is missing a logo completely, but Yahoo has a Flash logo up for the day. Here is the logo:

Hat tip to Best of the Web on the Cinco De Mayo Ask.com piece.

Google:

Yahoo (Flash version):

AOL:

Ask.com:

Cre8asite Forums:

Search Engine Roundtable (our theme, it actually glows):

Past Earth Day themes and logos from the search industry:

• Google, Ask.com & Yahoo! Earth Day Logos, 2007
• Search Engine Commemorate Earth Day 2006, 2006
• Ask Jeeves & Google Earth Day, 2005
• Google Commemorates Earth Day, 2004

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, and many of the search engines have special logos up for the day. Google has an artistic logo, with children drawing the face of Martin Luther King Jr. on a sidewalk. Ask.com illustrates their background with Martin Luther King Jr. speaking and pointing. Dogpile promotes a Food Drive with Martin Luther King Jr.’s picture in the background. Even the Search Engine Roundtable has a theme for the day. Yahoo does not have a logo on their home page, and neither does Live Search.

Here are larger logos:

Google:

Ask.com:

Dogpile:

Search Engine Roundtable:

Search Engine Land is taking the Thanksgiving holiday off, and best wishes to all those celebrating today. We’ll be back with regular coverage tomorrow. Search engines are celebrating with special logos like those above. See the full-sized versions (including Yahoo’s animated one) and more special search logos in Search Engine Roundtable’s regular roundup, Thanksgiving 2007 from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Dogpile, & The Search Industry. Also see our post from yesterday, Flight Tracking, Airport Conditions, Real-Time Traffic, & Other Thanksgiving Search Tips, for those looking for Thanksgiving-related search advice.

Google doesn’t always do special logos for every holiday, but in the case of Halloween, it’s pretty consistent. Up today on the Google home page is the ninth consecutive Halloween logo it has run since 1999. Below, a look back at the past years, as well as this year’s animated logo from Yahoo and a Halloween-themed home page from Ask.com.

Google Halloween Logos

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

And 2007 in context of the entire page:

Yahoo Halloween Logo 2008

Yahoo went for a fun animated logo, where two skeletons walking a skeleton dog are scared by two kids dressed as ghosts. Two screenshots from it:

Ask Halloween Theme

Our Preview Of Halloween & Search Engine Industry post from yesterday wondered if Ask was going to go with ghosts, but it went for pumpkins, instead:

Live.com? No logo spotted, so far. However, Exalead has one:

And need to learn more about Halloween? Ask has a nice smart answer you’ll find for a search on halloween:

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Postscript Barry:

I wanted to show you the animated version of Yahoo in action. If you have flash enabled, you should be able to see the logo move below.