Tag: ASK.COM

Although it doesn't always get the most attention, Opera is a solid browser that continues to improve with each version. While they work on their next version, codenamed Peregrine (like the falcon), subtle improvements are being added to the current release, 9.51. The latest addition is Ask.com for the search bar. What do we think is so interesting about that? First, it's a step toward competing ...

Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site. With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in ...

Clever web based tools on your mobile phone have made getting around the city much easier in the past year or two. We've always had 411 service, but now services such as GOOG-411 will SMS us the address so we have it on us after the call. If you've ever been asked, "What's the name of that great pizza place on 4th? It starts with Mel's", using mobile search tools you can probably easily find out. ...

Remember back in July when Ask.com told us the company would "soon" be launching a tool that would let you automatically erase your search history to protect your privacy? Yeah, well soon is finally here, 5 months later. The world's fourth most popular search engine has officially launched AskEraser, the most aggressive search engine anonymizing tool we're aware of. All you have to do is click ...

Ask is doing it, Google's doing it, so of course Microsoft doesn't want to be left out of this new privacy sensation that's sweeping the nation. Of course, while Google announced a policy to limit how long it holds onto personally identifiable search data and Ask launched a service to let users delete their private data immediately after a search, Microsoft is calling for a new set of standards. ...

Sure, Google says it plans to reduce the amount of time it hangs on to personal user data for. But Ask.com is aiming to win the anonymous web search war (is there a war? Did somebody forget to tell us?) with a new weapon: AskEraser. Here's how it works. You enter a search term into the world's 4th most popular search engine. Ask.com will perform the search. And then it will immediately forget your ...

Search engine Ask.com has launched a new site design. When you first navigate to the website, you'll see a clean page with a search bar and a couple of icons representing different types of searches (web, images, city, news, blogs, etc). It's a bit like Google, if Google had icons next to its search types. But once you enter a search term, things are very different. First off, if you pause for a ...

Ask.com has started including official blog feeds in their search results when you search for popular brands or web site names. The feed listing displays the last three or four posts on the website's official blog at the top of the results page, along with a link to the blog itself. The feed even appears above the sponsored listings. When you search Download Squad, for example, you'll see our ...

The latest post at the Ask.com blog begins, "For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters." This is a promising start--I've occasionally been annoyed by the fact that Google interprets almost all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces--but then things go off ...

Bloglines, the immensely popular web-based feed reader owned by Ask.com, launched its long-awaited blog search engine yesterday. The search can be accessed from both the Bloglines and Ask.com web sites, with slightly different interfaces. Bloglines' search adds a "+" button next to each search result that lets you preview posts in their entirety and a "more info" link that shows a cute pop-up ...

A lot flew beneath my radar last week, including, unfortunately, a great post by TechCrunch's Frank Gruber called Comparing the Mapping Services, in which he compares, with some nice screenshots and tables, the big five online map services: Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and MapQuest. Gruber praises all of the services, but in the end he says (spoiler alert!), "Overall, Yahoo Maps was ...

Microsoft has hired away Ask.com's CEO Steve Berkowitz to lead its Online Business Group. Berkowitz is credited with Ask.com's revival and market gains over the last year and leading the redesign which removed the site's pop-up and banner ads. He's also the former President and CEO of IDG Books, publisher of the "Dummies" series. The Online Business Group is the umbrella under which ...

Sometime in the last week or so Ask.com launched a brand new map and driving direction service that definitely takes more than one cue from Google Maps. In fact, its basic functionality works pretty much exactly like Google Maps'. You can click and drag the map and zoom just like with Google Maps and it has street, satellite, and hybrid ("mixed") views like you're accustomed to. Once you ...

What a long strange trip it's been for the fictional, net-based "butler of information" Jeeves. He's survived the dot-com crash to turn into a Thanksgiving balloon, and now gets fired unceremoniously? For what? According to the BBC, annoying Barry Diller. Of course, last March Ask.com, owned by IAC boss Diller, purchased the Jeeves site for a cool couple of billion. Ever since then ...