Ask.com Heads Back To Its Origins with More Q&A Features Including a Beta Release
Yes, another Q & A service and this time it's Mr. Jeeves returning a bit more towards his roots as a Q & A service.
One difference (and for long time search industry watchers this will take you back) Ask Jeeves had human editors involved in building and maintaining the database including mining the web and creating question and answer sets.
This time around the Q&A database has been created by creating their own Q&A service and also crawling Q&A services including ChaCha, Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, and a variety of other web sites. Ask Jeeves can also be searched without asking a question. They continue to offer news, images, and video.
+ Ask is all about, "delivering great answers to all of our users’ questions."
+ New capabilities coming soon to Ask
One thing we're happy to see is that many Smart Answers remain. Actual answers on results pages and in this case they ARE created, mined, and maintained by human editors. Here's an example. Since we used this example many times in the past because Google continues to get it wrong, "Who is the Prime Minster of Israel?" Google ||| Ask Jeeves (Smart Answer). Ask Jeeves correct, Google incorrect. But one answer is just one answer.
Also announced in a blog post is (number two) is a beta release (You'll Need an Invite and Can Request One Here)
Here are some points from the second blog post along with a few questions we hope to discuss with the Ask Jeeves team.
Pose questions to real people is now possible for those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can’t address.
Aside from the Ask.com technology, how is this different than what other services like ChaCha, Answers.com, Vark, and many others provide? What makes Ask.com more useful than the others?
The human element: To make our community the most effective, Ask.com has the ability to route questions to relevant people based on interests and expertise. This means only the right people will be asked to answer a specific question, reducing spam and question fatigue.
How does one show they are an expert at X? What makes a person relevant? Will the experts be given access to resources aside for the "open web." Will these experts also be responsible for maintaining the question set that AJ, "plans to use to address future questions posed on Ask.com." How are questions like the following going to be handled: Does X love me? Isn't the new X album awful? What's your least favorite color?
What is a high quality answer? Is the source of the info part of a quality answer? What are the differences between high and low quality answers. Examples?
As some of you may know, Gary used to work at Ask.com (he hasn't worked there for about 2.5 years) and many of the people he worked with there have also left the company.
Shirl and Gary plan on giving the service (what's available today) and the beta (once they get an invite) a go with a variety of questions and they will report back.
So to summarize, new features on Ask.com today and the beta release of a new Q&A service. However, the current "live" version of Ask.com can also answer questions using a variety of sources. (-:
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