Ask Jeeves Launches Web Answers

The search engine Ask Jeeves promoted two new search products on Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com). According to the company, the new additions increase relevance and guide users to find the information they need faster.

The first of the launches - "Zoom," is a next-generation related-search tool that gives users suggestions to narrow or expand their searches. "Web Answers," is the new technology which provides direct answers harvested in real time from the billions of Web pages in the Ask Jeeves index.

"Today's launches significantly advance the cause of some of our most popular search features," said Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties. "Zoom and Web Answers are not bells and whistles; they are important innovations on some of our core search technologies, which will help our users find what they need faster than with other search engines."

As the company explained, Zoom is a new concept navigation tool that offers suggestions to narrow and refine your search ("zooming in"), or expand your search ("zooming out") to explore new ideas.

Zoom is visually represented on the Ask Jeeves SERPs with suggestions. The index of suggestions is categorized on the right side of the page into Narrow Your Search, Expand Your Search and Related Names.

Zoom takes advantage of, and builds on, the unique clustering ability of the company's Teoma search technology. Zoom examines the relationships between these communities to identify and present conceptually-related topics to the searcher, explains the company.

Here is the example of the Zoom feature: with the query "Beatles," zooming in with Narrow Your Search returns "Beatles Lyrics," "Beatles History," "Beatles and Biographies" and "Beatles Wallpaper." Alternatively, by zooming out with Expand Your Search, suggestions include "Rolling Stones," "Led Zeppelin," "Beach Boys," "Woodstock," and even "1960's" to help users clarify what they are looking for. Meanwhile, Related Names is able to isolate "John Lennon," "Ringo Starr," "Paul McCartney" and "George Harrison" as relevant suggestions.

"Searchers don't want to spend time to formulate and enter involved search terms. As a result, queries are frequently short or ambiguous," said Daniel Read, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves.

Web Answers extends Ask Jeeves' direct-answering abilities by mining unstructured data in real time.

The new capability increases relevance by finding answers hidden within regular Web pages.

"Web Answers allows Ask Jeeves to answer far more queries than would be possible using editors or structured databases," continued Read. "By mining unstructured Web data, we can tap the billions of pages in our index for answers."

Web Answers is uniquely presented to the user as the top organic search result on the Ask Jeeves results page. The result is labeled as a "Web Answer."

In user testing, Ask Jeeves found that Web Answers improved the click-through rate on the top search result by over 200%.

Where is AskJeeves in the search engine market chart? Google has 36.4 percent of the U.S. search engine market compared to 5.5 percent for Ask Jeeves, according to the research firm Media Metrix. Yahoo Inc. (30.6 percent market share), Microsoft Corp.'s MSN (16.5 percent) and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL (8.9 percent) also beat Ask Jeeves.