Ask.com: Getting Personal

It’s been awhile since our last post, as we’ve been heads down working on a slew of updates designed to up the quality of our users’ experience on Ask.com – that means the quality of questions asked and the relevance/usefulness of answers produced.
 
To that end, this week we began rolling out the ability to personalize your Q&A experience on Ask.com with our Browse by Interests tab. So, once you create a profile on Ask.com, we will automatically ferret out questions and answers related to those topics, and showcase those in the My Interests tab in the Browse Q&A section. If you allow us to grab profile info from another social network – say Facebook or LinkedIn – we will also use that data to personalize the My Interests tab.
 
This personalized experience is part of our larger vision for what Ask.com Q&A is about. First, if the answer already exists on the Web and you can get it in milliseconds without bugging a single person, we should give it to you. Second, if you do need a person to answer, we should optimize the chances of you getting a high quality answer – quickly – as well as make it easy and fun to ask subsequent questions. From a feature standpoint, that means things like intelligent routing so your question is delivered to the people most qualified to answer it first. The ability to follow people who consistently provide highly relevant questions and answers on the site also helps you customize your experience. And now, the ability to filter your experience to reflect the questions and answers most pertinent to your life takes that one step further.
 
Check out this short video for more detail on how personalized browse works. And if you’re not yet part of the Ask.com Q&A beta, download our mobile app, or click this link for an invite.

Happy New Year!

Jason Rupp, Director, Product Management