ASK announced today the addition of health related answers to their “Smart Answers” engine. The answers which made available through a cooperation with healthline.com, a health search engine, cover a wide range of medicine each with links to related topics such as Composition, Dosage, Forms, Interactions, Precautions and Side Effects.
Here’s the results for a simple search for Naproxen on ASK:

From the official press release:
Ask.com and other major consumer-facing businesses are leveraging Healthline’s content to quickly obtain accurate and relevant medical definitions, images, and links to doctor-reviewed content to enhance the consumer experience and improve the brand ensuring the consumer experience.
As …read more

As ASK is getting ready for the launch of ASKEraser, its anonymous search tool due out soon, it joined forces with MSN in an effort to create an “industry standard” to better protect consumer privacy. The two, who are more of the “market followers” in the industry joined yesterday and proposed a project which would “bring together businesses, advocacy groups and academics to develop a set of guiding principles that would help alert users when their online behavior is being tracked and for how long that information is retained.”
Privacy issues became public concern with Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick and …read more

While Google keeps on getting more and more hear for insisting on keeping surfer’s information infinitely (in Internet terms at least), ASK seems to have gotten the picture and announced today a new search tool which will forget about you altogether, Sort of like “10 Second Tom” from 50 First Dates…
The new tool, called AskEraser will offer users complete control over their privacy when searching for information: With AskEraser, people can ensure that their search history will not be retained by Ask.com. Searchers will have easy access to AskEraser and can change their privacy preference at any time. Once …read more

Earlier this month, ASK introduced its new interface along with a new ad campaign. This week, it added just another ad to the mix, this time it is a woman who “found what she was looking for”… Apparently she was looking for Kato Kaelin ?!? who according to ASK was “a footnote in the notorious 1995 murder trial of retired football star O.J. Simpson“.

Along with the new 3D interface, ASK launched a television ad campaign aimed at driving more traffic to try it out. The commercial is themed as “I got what I’m looking for” with half naked women dancing in the background.
Check it out on YouTube:

ASK.com had replaced its entire UI and introduced a more “hip” 3D interface integrating several verticals all together on all serps.

All serps include a “framed page” with a left side navigation which allows one to refine the current query with narrower terms, wider terms and even related names. The “result” part of the page include (among the regular results), a quick image search, definition, related news from the blogosphere and a small “sponsored listing” bar.
For example I ran a search for “Ass” (just because the letters are close, nothing else!) and the results are quite promising.
Narrow your search included:
Tiny …read more