Feb 21, 2012 at 4:20pm ET by Matt McGee

You've probably read the news already that Scroogle is gone forever. It launched back in 2003 and was popular among searchers who wanted to get Google search results in a private setting. Now that it's gone, where can searchers go for a more private search experience than Google and Bing offer by default? Here's a list of a few alternatives. Note that different search engines below make different privacy-related claims; I haven't investigated them in detail -- i.e., by examining cookies, etc. -- so anyone looking for a private search experience should do his/her own research. Private Sea [...]

Ask.com Has The Most Long-Winded Searchers, Report Says

Jan 24, 2012 at 7:28pm ET by Matt McGee

The longest search queries are happening on Ask.com, where users average almost five words per search. That's according to research from Chitika. The ad network analyzed search referrals on "hundreds of millions" of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals -- at an average of 4.81 words -- came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied. It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com [...]

Ask.com Opens Up Its Human Q&A Community, Steps Further Away From Search

Sep 1, 2011 at 6:17pm ET by Matt McGee

After more than a year in beta, Ask.com today opened the doors on its community-based question-and-answer product. It positions Ask as much less search-oriented, and much more Q&A based -- not unlike its original incarnation in the 1990s. The Q&A site had been available in beta to a limited number of users since last July (2010) when Ask began to transition from search to Q&A. As you'll see on the third screenshot below, Ask says it has more than 344,000 people already in the Q&A community. At the time of the initial announcement last summer, the Ask.com homepage still had a search bar, [...]

Related Topics: Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Features: Analysis | Top News

Ask.com Celebrates 15th Birthday

May 10, 2011 at 6:55am ET by Greg Sterling

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 [...]

IAC Revises And Re-Ups Its Deal With Google

Apr 11, 2011 at 3:37pm ET by Pamela Parker

IAC, the parent of Ask.com, the Daily Beast and Citysearch, today announced it has amended and extended its distribution agreement with Google through March 31, 2016. The deal, which involves the distribution of AdWords ads and other search-related services to IAC sites, was originally scheduled to expire at the end of 2012. Though IAC didn't get into specific details about what terms changed, the company says the new agreement is "comparable" to the previous agreement, when taken as a whole. Back in November, Ask.com gave up web search to concentrate on Q&A search, and was said to be [...]

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