Ask is relaunched with a question and answer database.

We have always had a soft spot for the Ask search engine. Throughout the years they have managed to make some serious innovations as regards search technology and the presentation of search results.

For instance: When Google and Bing presents search results in three column table, with results in the center, that is an idea they stole from Ask. But for some peculiar reason Ask seems to lose its direction. Ask abandoned that design for one that looked like the old version of Google before Google and Bing copied them. It is as if Ask lacks the courage to follow its ideas through, and ends up as a bleak copy of its competitors.

Natural language

Ask (or Ask Jeeves as it was called) originally was known as the natural language search engine. The idea was that you could enter a regular question in the search field: “Who is the president of the USA?”, instead of the queries we all use now: “president USA”. Ask Jeeves had a database of such questions, where the results were hand picked by human editors. If a relevant response could not be found in the search engine fetched results from its regular search index.

It turned out that this wasn’t much of a competitive advantage after all, partly because searchers quickly learned the short hand of search engine queries, partly because Google became very good at guessing what you were looking for and partly because it takes a lot of work to manage a human edited database.

A return to answers

Ask has not given up on the idea, though. In 2008 and 2009 it announced that it was going to revive the idea of natural language search, this time base on automated semantic search. It didn’t make much of a difference.

This week Ask (Ask Jeeves in Britain) was relaunched as a natural language search engine again, this time based on a human edited database of responses. Although the search engine will generate automatically produced search results, like Google and Bing, the main focus in on its Q and A feature. It looks a bit like Yahoo! Answers.

The new Ask

On July 26 the Ask Blog announced that they had officially launched the public beta for the new Ask.com

“..which combines our proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the Web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques. Now available on an invite-only basis …, the capability to pose questions to real people is now possible for those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can’t address.”

The idea is that you may send in a question. Ask will reroute the question to one of many volunteers, who will then send you a response within five to ten minutes. Gradually this will help Ask build up a database with unique content.

Problems

The problem with this approach is twofold. First you need to ensure that your experts really know what they are talking about, and you need some way of controlling the quality of the answers. I guess user comments and voting could help out in that respect.

Second you need some way of updating the database. The world is changing. The web is changing. What was a relevant answer a year ago, may not be so today.

Ask is now displaying its Q and A feature prominently on its front page. The idea is clearly that the featured question will be interesting content for their users regardless of what they have come to search for.

When in Rome

We have not had the time to test the new feature. We have done some searches to see what the database can bring you, though.

A search for “what shall i see in rome?”, for instance, brought up the answer to “What to see in rome?” (fair enough) and that answer was the following sentence:

“Rome is located in Italy. Tis (sic) is one of the most visited city’s. You can see the Colosseum, The Vatican, Piazza Navona and Spanish stairs.”

The next relevant result was a response from another Q & A service, Wiki Answers:

“In Rome you can see many interesting things like:The Colloseum (sic), aqueducts, and other various building remains. ”

Anyone who has been to Rome realize that these are both completely unhelpful answers. A regular web search with a link to a tourist site would be immensely more useful. It should be noted that some of Ask’s responses do include links to relevant sites. When that is the case, a one sentence response may be useful.

One of the questions showcased by Ask is:

“What is Glycogenolysis?”

Again the responses are less than helpful:

“Glycogen is the storage form for glucose in the liver and muscles. Glycogenolysis is the conversion of glycogen into glucose in the liver and in the muscles.”

An alternative answer given is:

“Glycogenolysis is the breakdown of glycogen to glucose for use as metabolic fuel. It maintains the normal blood concentration of glucose in the fasting state.”

These are both correct, but for someone unfamiliar with terms like glucose and metabolic, the answer only leads to new questions. Links to relevant articles (like on the Wikipedia) would have been helpful. But that would, of course, bring up the problem of link rot and the need to update old questions.

The wrong approach to knowledge

These answers remind us of the debate on Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha believes there is one correct answer to any question. This isn’t the case even for quantitative questions in the natural sciences, let alone for the social and cultural questions Ask tries to answer.

Learning is to look at a large number of sources, changing you whole understanding of the world in the process. This is what regular search engines are good at. They deliver a large number of alternative results, helping you find more extensive information on different sites. If you want to replace those sites with information produced by yourself, you need to deliver more than a “factual” sentence.

The fact is that Ask’s Q & A service is not so much competing with Google, but the Wikipedia. And if that is the march Ask is aiming for they need to gain some weight.

New design

Ask has also presented a new design for the site. It is a bit old fashioned, but simplistic and easy to read. There are now links to alternative search queries, alternative questions and your search history in the right hand column — all very useful features.

See also: Search Engine Land: Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering