Ask.com
168 In 2005, the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves. On February 27, 2006, the character disappeared from Ask.com, and was stated to be "going in to retirement." The U.K./Ireland edition of the website, at uk.ask.com [6], prominently brought the character back in 2009. InterActiveCorp owns a variety of sites including country-specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask Kids [7], Teoma (now ExpertRank[8] ) and several others (see this page for a complete list). On June 5, 2007 Ask.com relaunched with a 3D look.[9]
On May 16, 2006, Ask implemented a "Binoculars Site Preview" into its search results. On search results pages, the "Binoculars" let searchers capture a sneak peek of the page they could visit with a mouse-over activating screenshot pop-up.[10] Ask.com headquarters in Oakland, California
In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature,[11] allowing users to opt-out from tracking of search queries and IP and cookie values. They also vowed to erase this data after 18 months if the AskEraser option is not set. HTTP cookies must be enabled for AskEraser to function.[12] [13] On July 4, 2008 InterActiveCorp announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.[14] [15] On July 26, 2010, Ask.com released a closed-beta Q&A service. The service was released to the public on July 29, 2010.[16] Ask.com launched its mobile Q&A app for the iPhone in late 2010.[17]
Corporate details Ask Jeeves, Inc. stock traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange from July 1999 to July 2005, under the ticker symbol ASKJ. In July 2005, the ASKJ ticker was retired upon the acquisition by InterActiveCorp, valuing ASKJ at US$1.85Â billion.
Ask Sponsored Listings Ask Sponsored Listings is the search engine marketing tool offered to advertisers to increase the visibility of their websites (and subsequent businesses, services, and products) by producing more prominent and frequent search engine listing.
Ask Toolbar browser add-on controversy The Ask Toolbar has been accused of being malware, spyware, difficult to fully uninstall, installing without permission, and of being intentionally targeted at children.[18] [19] The Ask Toolbar is a web-browser Add-on that can appear as an extra bar added to the browser's window and/or menu and which will change the user's browsers settings and search preferences. It is often installed during the process of another installation, possibly without the installing user's consent or knowledge. It is detected as malware by some virus and spyware detection systems.[20] Ask.com has entered into partnerships with some software security vendors, whereby they are paid to distribute the toolbar alongside their software, and they agree not to detect the toolbar software as malware. The Comodo anti-virus software previously detected the Ask toolbar as 'Unclassified Malware@8305287' until a partnership with Ask where the Ask toolbar was distributed and installed alongside Comodo products.[21]