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 has been refocusing on questions and answers in recent years — and asking questions tends to involve more words than other types of queries.

It would be great to get real search query length data directly from the search engines, but they’ve never made a habit of sharing that kind of information. In May 2010, Google did release data showing that 54.5 percent of queries are more than three words — which falls in line with the Google (and Bing) data that Chitika shows above. But that’s the last time I’m aware of that either Google or Bing shared such information.

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, but a “Question of the Day” and a short list of “Popular Questions” was added.

(Ask.com homepage, July 27, 2010)

Today, the home page still has that “Question of the Day,” but several human-powered Q&A sets show below it along with a box letting users add new answers right from the home page. The old “Search” button now says “Ask,” and the Image/News/Local and other search options have been moved from the top menu bar to a “Search Tools” area in the right column.

(Ask.com homepage, September 1, 2011)

Search has clearly been minimized with the new homepage. The top navigation now features “Ask People” as prominently as “Search the Web.”

The “Ask” button on the homepage actually works like a search button, but the search results page goes out of its way to promote the Q&A aspects of Ask.com.

Ask’s new focus is fully on display when you switch over to the “Ask People” tab. That’s where you get an experience that will be familiar to most anyone who’s ever spent time on a Q&A site.

Yahoo Answers is the 800-lb. gorilla among answers sites, and Quora has gained a lot of momentum in the past year. There’s also Facebook Questions, Answers.com and a host of other options for people looking for human — not algorithmic — answers to their questions and queries. And don’t forget that Google bought Aardvark about 18 months ago and there’s been speculation that it signaled Google’s interest in getting back into the Q&A space. (Then again, Aardvark has remained in Google Labs since the purchase, and everything in Labs is currently in a state of uncertainty.)

All of which is to say that, despite Ask’s pedigree in Q&A, there’s no guarantee it’ll do better there than it has in search.

(Tip via WSJ.)

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 other engines copy to varying degrees
• January 2008: Lanzone is out as Ask CEO, Jim Safka replaces him but later leaves
• April 2009: Jeeves the Butler returns in the UK
• July 2009: Doug Leeds takes over as CEO of Ask
• July 2010: Ask embraces “social search” (Q&A) and establishes current strategy

Ask has a relatively stable following at about 3 percent of overall search volume.

Current Ask CEO Doug Leeds says the following about where the company is going:

During the next few years, Ask will increasingly be able to deliver answers and information based on what you tell us about who you are, where you are and what you’re doing. Factoring in this kind of context will mean things like:

— The ability to control the social graph around your Q&A behavior, such as routing and filtering questions and answers based on people you know and your relationships with them.

— Asking questions about a specific location, browsing questions and answers from people nearby, directing specific questions to people near you or people who visit the places you frequent most.

The underpinning of this, naturally, is mobile and this is an area Ask will continue to tackle aggressively over the next few years:  a growing suite of mobile apps designed to accommodate a variety of use cases, ubiquity on all mobile platforms and operating systems, and more integration and transparency with third party developers. We want to be your de facto mobile Q&A experience. That’s what we’re aiming toward.

While Ask still has a meaningful following and usage it’s struggling to overcome insiders’ perceptions that it is no longer relevant in search. That’s not something that regular users care about however. But if mobile is the focus for the future — something consumers do care about — Ask really needs to execute at an unprecedented level.

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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 working with a partner to provide search results. The renewal of the Google agreement seems to hint at Google being the one to provide that service, but no one is specifically saying that. It’s unclear whether Bing was actively working to win IAC as a partner.

IAC says its search business has grown from $50 million in operating income before amortization in 2006 to $125 million in 2010.

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.

NOTE: SEE OUR FOLLOW-UP PIECE, Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering

The new Ask.com homepage represents a pretty dramatic change. Search is still front and center, but in order to focus on the Q&A aspect, Ask says all users will now see the “Question of the Day” feature; a section of “Popular Questions” is also featured prominently on the home page.

The look-and-feel changes are just the beginning, though. In a separate blog post, Ask has announced a public beta of a new site that brings a human question-and-answer community into the mix. Here’s Ask answering the “Why?” question before it’s asked:

Why the re-energized focus on Q&A? From a macro trend perspective, the explosion of the social Web underscores both the cultural shift and massive technical innovation of the last 15 years. Simply put: people are using the Web as a conversational medium, ergo, consumers are increasingly asking questions (evidenced by demonstrated interest in Q&A from Google, Facebook and an entire cadre of start-ups).

From a product perspective, the new Ask.com is designed to fill some major holes left by search engines through a blend of technology and the strongest asset we have – our users.

On the human/community side, Ask says it will be able to route questions to the right people based on “interests and expertise” — presumably as defined in user profiles. Community responses will also be made available to Ask’s search algorithm to answer questions posed via the search box.

Ask is taking requests for an invite to the beta site at www.ask.com/invite.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

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

Chitika studied the search behavior of more than 39,000 users visiting sites across its online ad network — users who searched for the same exact word/phrase in a short period of time before hitting one of Chitika’s sites.

Users who first searched at Google chose Yahoo for the follow-up search almost 50% of the time, which is perhaps not much of a surprise. But that Ask.com grabbed more than 30% of presumably unsuccessful Google searches is a surprise; that’s almost double Bing’s 16.4%.

What we don’t know from Chitika’s numbers is the trend: Is Bing’s 16.4% higher than it was, say, a year ago when the search engine first launched? (Probably.) Is Yahoo’s 50% lower than a year ago? (Could be.)

If nothing else, the study does suggest that Bing could grab 30% of Google’s unsatisfied users by buying Ask.com, which may or may not be for sale at this point.

Eventually, Teoma went away but sometime last month, Teoma returned. Sean Carlos asked IAC, the parent company of Ask.com and Teoma, why the return and they told him they wanted to give searchers an alternative to Ask.com by giving them a “simple interface for everyday keyword web search.” IAC told Sean:

As we announced in November, we are focused on building the best service for answering questions and delivering the best results for searches posed as questions on Ask.com. We re-launched Teoma.com in mid-April to provide a simplified interface for everyday keyword web search. Teoma.com’s organic results will be similar to, but not exactly the same as, those on Ask.com, primarily for testing purposes, but also to provide a more simplified search experience.

It is true, the organic results on Teoma are similar but definitely not exactly the same as Ask.com.

Armstrong said this at Citi’s annual entertainment, media and telecommunications conference today. This was prompted by a question about possibly using Microsoft Bing as a search partner at the end of this year, when the Google deal expires. Armstrong added that a new search deal, under the new independent AOL, will be financially good for them. He specifically said they “may trade search dollars for more display dollars.”

Armstrong is a former Google executive, who was named the CEO of AOL back six months ago.