#Ask.com 1996 to Present

Ask.com - Succeed Through Branding Or Innovation? Ask Has Had A Difficult Time Making Up Their Minds.

Big picture: We like Ask because they keep trying to do something different. We also like that they started in business in 1996, the same year we started. But they area always coming up frustratingly short in our minds.

The whole idea behind Ask.com s marketing efforts is that they make searching simple. Unfortunately, in several ways, Ask makes searching frustrating. Especially frustrating are the six paid sponsor matches that appear at the top of each search result page against a barely visible light blue background. Basically, if you set your monitor at the standard 800x600 resolution, all you will see are advertisements when you do a search at Ask.com. You have to scroll down to see the real search results.

The good: You used to be able to pay Ask to get your pages indexed. You paid a company called INeedHits. Pay for inclusion programs create a very hazy line between editorial (organic search) and advertising (paid search), and no search engine has done a fair job at it. Luckily, Ask dropped their paid inclusion program in 2004 just as Yahoo! was really ramping up their program.

At this point, Ask is working hard to go back to its original vision where it aimed to be able t answer to any question you could pose it. To that end, Ask is creating a community of volunteers to help refine it s results. At some point in the future, they may just make something useful. In the meantime, we re sure that there are thousands of low-level SEO folks in there answering those questions.

Ask.com Search Engine Analysis

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Create a sitemap and ping Ask by typing the following url into your browser window: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml