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"Ask.com has been through quite a few overhauls in its existence. You cannot deny their persistence, and quest for innovation in the search engine space, but unfortunately it's bringing them very little in terms of market share. \nIn their latest update, they're delivering on the promise they gave back when they were called Ask Jeeves: if you ask a question, instead of a simple list of results, you get more structured data that tries to directly answer your question. \nI've tried out a couple of examples with great results. The questions \"how old is the earth\" and \"who is Bill Clinton\" yielded perfect answers, while others, such as \"What are iPhone's specifications?\" yielded no direct answer, but (unlike Google) gave me a direct link to Apple's iPhone specifications page. \nHowever, as always, it's not hard to think of questions that Ask.com will not be able to answer. The problem with this \"semantic\" approach is that you soon find out that asking questions doesn't always work, so you're tempted to switch back to your \"regular\" way of searching: stringing relevant keywords in hope to find a related Web page. Ask.com has an answer to that, too; a new option on the front page called Q&amp;A returns results solely in the form of questions and answers related to your search, taken from sites such as Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers; grouping these indexes was probably a relatively simple affair, but the result is quite usable, and I reckon that those seeking direct answers will immediately switch to this option. \nThere are more changes under the hood. Ask.com's CEO Jim Safka claims the site has been rebuilt from the ground up, yielding more relevant results and doing it faster than ever before. It's hard to judge if this is true as I cannot directly compare the old version with the new, but I was quite pleased with the results of some simple searches I've conducted. Is it better than Google? Probably not; as I've speculated once before, it's nearly impossible due to the fact that everyone who's SEO-aware builds their Web pages for Google. \nThe question for Ask.com is: should they try to be the general purpose search engine, or should they find a smaller, more convenient niche? Their refocus on giving direct answers, like they've done with this latest update, could give us (no pun intended) the answer to that question.  \n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/10/05/askcom-answers/>