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Ask

Ask.com is an Internet search engine. It is also the company name of the division of IAC Search & Media, founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California.

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. In reality, technology wasn’t what made Ask Jeeves perform so well. Behind the scenes, the company at one point had about 100 editors who monitored search logs. They then went out onto the web and located what seemed to be the best sites to match the most popular queries. Today, Ask Jeeves instead depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users. These results come from the Teoma search engine that it owns.

It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching and strives to be more intuitive and user-friendly than other search engines. In other words, when you ask a question, it searches for the answer.

The Jeeves branding ceased from early 2006. 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, 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. In June 2007 the site was relaunched with a new, simpler look.