Ask.com Answers — Jeeves Works for You Now

Ask.com used to be known as AskJeeves.com — remember Jeeves the butler? Well, he “retired” (they turfed him) in 2006, so officially this little search engine is just Ask.com. Ask.com is all about “semantic search” technology. Roughly translated from Nerdese, that means “search engine that understands what you’re looking for.” In practical terms, it means that you type a question into the Ask.com search bar, and you’ll get an answer. So it’s not just typing keywords into a search bar, like you would with Google or Yahoo, it’s the whole question. And what you get is not just a clickable list of URLs with websites related to your question — you get a real answer. Ask.com’s AnswerFarm technology has crawled over 100 million question-and-answer pairs from hundreds of thousands of sources, and made it all accessible right from the search bar (click the “lots of answers” option). The results are mostly from Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, eHow.com, AllExperts.com, etc., but you’ll also see answers from regular websites. It didn’t take very long to find answers left by savvy web marketers. We asked Ask, “how do you get rid of cockroaches?” and clicking through the top-ranked answer took us here: This marketer used the how-to site eHow.com to build up some authority on the subject, and got listed first in Ask.com. And what is the solution offered? “Go to my website and buy the e-book!”nn…So how can you make this work for you? Well for starters, your site should have an FAQ page filled with questions your target market asks, and smart, relevant, keyword-rich answers. Remember, Ask.com’s AnswerFarm crawls question-and-answer pairs, so sticking to the Q&A format is a good idea. You could even add some questions and answers to your salescopy or other content. You should also be looking for other ways to share your know-how on the Web, as the cockroach guy did. Try adding to some of the Web’s many answer or how-to websites, or contribute your expertise to wikis. And of course, you can always use this technology to check out your competition! Ask.com searches all the answer sites for you and puts the results in one place. So you can see how searchers are wording their questions, who’s answering them… and how YOU can answer them better! The Internet Marketing Center Team