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ww.Ask.com
was originally known as Ask Jeeves,
where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorenson), fetching
answers to any question asked. The character was based on
Jeeves,
Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse.
The original idea behind
Ask Jeeves was to allow
users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural
language. Ask.com was the first commercial question-answering
search engine for the World Wide Web. It supports a variety of
user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as
traditional keyword searching. Ask Jeeves sold the same technology
used on the ask.com site to corporations including Dell, Toshiba,
and E-Trade. That part of the business was sold to Kanisa in 2002.
ASK.CM points to an ad site.
ww.Ask.cm headquarters in Oakland, CAOn
September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out
Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character was
disassociated with Ask.com.
Ask.com owns a variety of sites including country-specific
sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and
Spain along with Ask For Kids, Teoma (now defunct), Excite,
MyWay.com, iWon.com, Bloglines and several others. The
combined traffic to these web sites places Ask.com in the top
ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore
and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004. As of June 5, 2007
the site relaunched with a new, more simplistic look.
In December 2007, Ask released the AskEraser feature, 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. The Center for
Democracy and Technology's positive evaluation of AskEraser
differed from that of privacy groups including the Electronic
Privacy Information Center who found problems such as the
requirement that HTTP cookies be enabled for AskEraser to
function.
The ww.Ask.com toolbar is a free toolbar from
Ask.com. It is available for both the Firefox and Internet
Explorer web browsers.
Features include desktop and e-mail searching, weather forecasts,
stock portfolios, and a zooming feature which increases the size
of any webpage. It has been reported to include spyware.
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