Meet the New Ask.com

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.

"Ask's heritage has always been about answering questions – in fact, more people associate Ask with answering questions than any other brand in the world," says Ask.com U.S. President Doug Leeds. "As users continue to embrace the social Web, now is the perfect time to extend Ask’s technology beyond finding pages that have answers to finding people who do as well.  With 87 million monthly users and more than a decade of Q&A experience, Ask.com is uniquely positioned to answer the long tail of questions that are impossible for search engines alone to address."

It's worth noting that Google purchased Aardvark not too long ago, which also calls upon a community to answer questions, but the company's plans for the service are still somewhat unclear. It remains to be seen if that will become fully integrated with the search engine.

"As the Web becomes more conversational in nature, consumer expectations and the Web’s ability to meet those expectations are changing rapidly.  It has become natural for people to ask questions and receive answers online, and algorithmic search alone can only take that proposition so far,” says Allen Weiner, Research VP, Media Industry, Gartner Research.  "There is a huge market opportunity for companies who can get this right." source: webpronews.com

Android Market Sales Commence In Korea

South Korea has a reputation for being home to some of most ardent smartphone users in existence, and Android devices are supposed to be among the world's most advanced smartphones.  It never made much sense, then, that Koreans were only allowed to access free Android apps, and Google's now (mostly) corrected the oversight.

Tim Bray announced on the Android Developers Blog, "As of today, Android Market is open for business to application buyers in the Republic of Korea. . . .  We welcome the people of Korea, acknowledged everywhere as one of the world's most-wired societies, to the world of Android."

There's only one small problem.  Bray also wrote, "We hope that this will make the outstanding Android devices now available in that nation even more useful and fun."  And Matt Brian reported that Android games remain off-limits in Korea due to complications with a rating system.

Still, this development represents a big step forward for Android that's bound to make the mobile operating system significantly more appealing to consumers in Korea.  Its market share - and ability to generate revenue - should improve as a result.
 

eBay Launches Social Media Seller Initiative

eBay sellers who use Twitter and Facebook on a regular basis might soon receive a bit of recognition for their efforts. Something called the eBay Ink Social Media Seller program has launched, and while it's still very much in the early stages, it's not looking like a terrible idea.

Richard Brewer-Hay explained this afternoon on the eBay Ink blog, "We've been working on a program behind the scenes here at eBay that I'm hoping will help promote all of the great online sellers that are embracing social media tools as a way to augment their presence online, ultimately promoting their stores and sales."


The program's payoff: badges that are supposed "to drive traffic to their social media seller profiles and/or their ecommerce stores." Plus, at least at this point, a fair amount of publicity to split between not many folks.

You see, it seems that just six people (@ColderICE, @PowerSellingMom, @thesavvyseller, @galleriagifts, @auctionwally, and @katskloset) have been granted eBay Ink Social Media Seller status so far, meaning the label may be reserved for a fairly special set of individuals. Which would mean the badges could be of real value.

U.S. Launching Program To Detect Cyberattacks On Critical Infrastructure

The U.S. National Security Agency is launching a program called "Perfect Citizen" aimed at detecting cyberattacks on private companies and government agencies running critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid and nuclear power plants.

Perfect Citizen would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would flag "unusual activity" signaling an impending cyberattack, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Defense contractor Raytheon recently was awarded with a classified contract for the first stage of the surveillance program valued up to $100 million.

Some industry and government officials with knowledge of the program view Perfect Citizen as overreaching by the NSA into domestic affairs, while other view it as a critical program to fight emerging security threats that only the NSA can manage.

"The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government...feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security," said one internal Raytheon email, the text of which was seen by The Wall Street Journal. "Perfect Citizen is Big Brother."

A U.S. military official said the program was long overdue and would not be a violation of privacy.

U.S. intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about possible Chinese and Russian surveillance of computer systems that control the electric grid and other U.S. infrastructure.

"Because the program is still in the early stages, much remains to be worked out, such as which computer control systems will be monitored and how the data will be collected. NSA would likely start with the systems that have the most important security implications if attacked, such as electric, nuclear, and air-traffic-control systems," according to the Journal.

NSA chief General Keith Alexander head of the recently created US Cyber Command said in a speech that the role of the agency is to ""deter, detect and defend against emerging threats against our nation in cyberspace."

"All of us in government recognize that we cannot do this without the help of industry, academia and our allies," he said. "Securing cyberspace is a team sport."

Twitter Launches @earlybird Deals Feed

Twitter has introduced a new ecommerce feature called @earlybird which offers "special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events."

"We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community," the company said.
"Our advertising partners determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and price. As with other forms of advertising from Twitter, we are focused on bringing value to our users and will keep your interests in mind as we develop this program."

Twitter said it launched @earlybird because many users find the site timely and that it has relevant information. "We believe that surfacing deals through the @earlybird account will help you discover the best of those deals, as well as find and follow accounts that consistently provide exceptional value," Twitter said.

Twitter did not name any advertisers or brands but did say they would large brands initially focused on the U.S. market. The company said @earlybird will feature US-wide offers but it will consider location-based deals in the future.

2 Billion Add-Ons Downloaded by Firefox Users

Mozilla has served its 2 billionth Firefox Add-on download. The download rate has been increasing each year, but Firefox also faces increasing competition in the open source browser market.

This week Google actually took efforts to make Chrome more accessible, and introduced a new category of featured extensions.

Mozilla's milestone is certainly a significant one though, and there's no question that Firefox has been revolutionary in the web browser space.



"This exciting feat was made possible by the huge community of people who have made and used Firefox Add-ons since we launched in 2005," Mozilla says in its announcement. "Over the years, we remained dedicated to building features and products that make Firefox the world’s most customizable Web browser for consumers and developers."

Mozilla has put up a "Best of 2 Billion Firefox Add-ons" list based on feedback. There are 25 add-ons in the collection, with the top one being Adblock Plus.