Ask.com engine to be powered by humans

When it comes to search engines, it is no doubt that Google is king and will be for the forseeable future. Well, despite lagging far behind Google, Yahoo and Bing in terms of the search engine market, Ask.com still is the sixth-largest Web property in the world, drawing over 90 million unique visitors monthly. Ask.com hopes to go back to its roots by answering questions that users ask through natural, everyday English. It won’t do so using some sort of newfangled Artificial Intelligence, but will instead rely on actual humans to field customers’ queries. From today onwards, a new “Ask the Community” tool allows users to pose questions to a group of self-proclaimed “experts”, where there is a wide variety of fields to choose from. All responses will be delivered via e-mail, where the wait time shouldn’t be more than 10 minutes. How this will fare in the long run remains to be seen though.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers, Top Stories
Tags: search engine