A fraction of the queries entered into a search engine will find an answer that already exists on the web. But in an attempt to offer users even more answers — and continue to build on its re-launch as a Q&A community — Ask.com will be launching a more social search, including personalized browsing.

      The 15-year-old search engine differentiates its question and answer community from more recent startups in the space, like Quora, by directing users’ questions to experts — rather than leaving the answers up to the whole community — and by identifying users’ interests through their LinkedIn (LinkedIn) or Facebook (Facebook) profiles.

      The new personalized browsing aspect, which is available online only in beta with an invite or to Ask’s iPhone app users, helps the site generate its own profile for a user.

      “Users give a few pieces of information. We’ll ask if you want to input your details from Facebook or LinkedIn, and we grab certain pieces of your profile information to build a profile for you so we’ll know what questions we think you can answer,” says Jason Rupp, Ask.com’s director of product management.

      Based on that information, Ask.com can route questions to someone whose profile shows experience or knowledge in areas related to user-generated questions. The personalized information will also help the site identify users with similar interests, and users will be able to follow other users.

      Rupp says the company has found that, not surprisingly, those users choose to follow share similar interests and are interested in the same content.

      “We can start to make associations between your topics and theirs. We can see what types of things match up and build you a better content [experience],” he says.

      Ask.com re-launched itself as a Q&A site in July 2010. It may have started as one of the original big search engines, but today it’s trying to find a new niche. Social search — and user-generated answers produced via a search engine — might prove to be a successful area for the site and a new way to provide users more answers to their queries.

      “Social search is a relatively a new direction for us,” says Valerie Combs, Ask.com’s VP of communications. “It’s all part of a goal to create a peer-to-peer experience, tap into social and interest graphs to filter responses, and … search to find if an answer’s out there.”

      Often, in today’s Internet (Internet) age, handing over personal data and interests means users also provide sites the opportunity to provide targeted ads. When we asked if Ask.com intended to do that, Rupp and Combs said absolutely not.

      “The goal of this feature is to get the right questions and answers from people,” Rupp says. “All that data is about helping people find information; none of that will be used for advertising.”

      In an era where targeted ads have become the norm, Ask.com’s stance of strictly keeping that profile data separate from advertising might come as a welcome change for many users.

Source from Mashable