Ask.com has experienced a number of changes in recent years including its major decision to pull out of the search industry and focus on mobile efforts and primarily its question and answer service. The company has been very successful with its question and answer service and has thus proven that change can be very good.
Its latest change, however, took everyone, including the company’s executives, by surprise. As Lisa Kavanaugh, Ask.com’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, explained to WebProNews, the company found its latest way to transform itself in Tina Fey’s book Bossypants.
Although it was the last place Ask expected to find inspiration, Kavanaugh told us that they decided to try the “applied improvisation” the book recommends. When it worked, the company was both stunned and excited.
Kavanaugh told us that it has forced the company to think in a new way as opposed to the normal everyday way of thinking. Not only has “applied improvisation” changed the culture of Ask, but Kavanaugh said it has also helped it in terms of product development. The exercises were used in the creation of a polling app as well as the ability to speed up product roadmaps and reach goals faster.
She said she was a skeptic at first, but now she recommends it to other businesses.
Could you see “applied improvisation” benefitting your business? We’d love to know.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Apr 13th, 2012. 
- Image via CrunchBase
We’ve known that Ask has been working on a new version of Ask.com for months, but now it’s here. Ask is placing new emphasis on the Q&A side of search, and is injecting the Q&A experience directly into the main search experience, which is what SVP of Product Management Tony Gentile tells WebProNews, sets the new Ask apart from other Q&A sites.
He says they’ve taken a hybrid approach, utilizing existing partnerships and new technology that’s been refined over the last six to nine months, to build a new social Q&A experience that’s built directly into Ask’s search capabilities. When Ask doesn’t immediately give you an answer (or the right answer), you can simply ask “the community.”
We asked Gentile to tell us a little about who this community is. Initially, he says, they are using their existing employee base across IAC companies in a private beta. These employees are encouraged to invite their own families and friends to participate. Some journalists have been invited as well. Eventually this will expand. He says they will also implement technologies like Facebook Connect, Twitter, LinkedIn, OAuth, etc. to get users to bring in people from their own networks.
Also as a result of the social media aspect, he says profiles can lend credibility to answers. For example, if you answer a question and your LinkedIn profile is attached to it, that can show your experience in a field related to a question you have answered.
This is where the new Ask.com comes in as a potentially useful tool for businesses. Businesses may want to answer questions about products, and even create relationships with potential customers. An interesting nugget Gentile shared is that in analyzing the questions Ask receives, the majority of them are either related to “how do I spend my time?” or “how do I spend my money?”
Ask has the ability to work at the local level, as well. Gentile says they have the ability to analyze questions of both an implicit and an explicit local nature. For example, if someone asks, “what’s the best burrito shop in San Francisco?”, that’s clearly a local question, and they can route it accordingly to people in and who have visited San Francisco.
Another type of local question, however, is something like “who’s a babysitter I can trust?” That’s also a local question, but it doesn’t name a specific city. Ask says it has the ability to figure it out, and again, route accordingly. It calls upon signals in the user profiles. If a user gives permission, they will use location.
Here are the main features of the new Ask.com (as described by the company):
- Proprietary semantic search technologies: Finds the most relevant, quality answers across the Web, and displays them at the top of the page. No click-throughs required.
- The largest Q&A database on the Web: More than 500 million questions and answers indexed, and the ability to quickly extract Q&A pairs from hundreds of thousands of sources.
- Ask.com community: Leverages proprietary search categorization to route questions and solicit high-quality answers from community members based on their interests and areas of knowledge.
- New user interface: Improved UI makes it easy to ask and answer questions, highlights advancing and trending questions from the Ask community throughout the site.
Filed under Breaking News by on Jul 28th, 2010.
