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Ask Jeeves Search Engine: Users
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The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions created in everyday, natural language. Ask.com was the first commercial question-answering search engine for the World Wide Web (WWW). It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching and strives to be more instinctive and user-friendly than other search engines. In other words, when you request a question, it searches for the answer. Ask Jeeves sold the similar technology used on the ask.com site to corporations comprising Dell, Toshiba and E*Trade. That part of the business was sold in 2002 to Kanisa.
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Pasadena-based Citysearch (www.citysearch.com) and Ask Jeeves are in a partnership to provide Citysearch's local content and data to the Ask Jeeves search engine (www.ask.com). Ask.com search engine users will be able to tap into Citysearch data next month, including local business information such as restaurants, retails, travel, and professional services information. The deal will ... include editorial and user reviews of local businesses.
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The original Ask Jeeves search tool was developed in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. It launched in April 1997 with the concept that users could search in plain English, so that it became a popular consumer tool that appealed to users who were not familiar with searching the web.
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Along with its search results, Ask Jeeves has traditionally ... returned a list labeled "related topics," which are contextually related alternatives to the search query entered by the user. The point of providing these alternatives is to help the user refine the original query and hopefully generate search results that are more relevant.
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In 1996 the first advertiser-supported Ask Jeeves site was launched in Emeryville, California. The service attempts to provide information in simple question-and-answer format and avoid the Boolean strings which give thousands of matches, many specious, to users of other search engines. Using natural language processing technology and human editorial skills, the programme attempts to determine both the semantics (the meaning of the words) and syntactics (the meaning of the grammar) of each question.
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Now Ask Jeeves has improved this feature so that the search engine can better understand the various concepts related to a query and ... generate more and smarter suggestions. Users will also notice that instead of a single list of related topics, alternatives will now be grouped into three categories: suggestions for narrowing the scope of the search, suggestions for expanding the scope of the search, and related name suggestions.
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