By David Chartier
October 06, 2008 - 02:32PM CT

Ask.com today introduced a new version of its search engine that is both a return to the company's semantic roots and a move to become more of a one-stop shop for not just search results, but the information contained in those results. We took the new engine for a spin and spoke with Erik Collier, VP of Products at Ask. At the core of Ask.com's update today are what Collier says are "massive improvements" to the company's semantic search technology.

Ask may have phased out the Jeeves character from its brand two years ago, but the concept of searching via natural language queries is stronger than ever with "a new focus on specific types of structured data feeds, like TV listings and events," Collier told Ars. "But also UGC (User Generated Content) sites like Wikipedia, as well as question-answer sites, government fact pages, and more."

Examples of Ask.com's enhanced semantic abilities begin with questions like "What causes headaches?" and "What is a good credit score?" Testing with these queries, and others like "how do I take great photos," revealed strong results, especially when compared to search giants like Google and Yahoo. In addition to scraping sentence fragments for the description of a search result, though, Ask.com now provides complete snippets of information for many natural-language queries as part of a new technology dubbed DAFS, or Direct Answers From Search.

The aforementioned headache question returns everything from a photo and single-sentence explanation from Healthline.com, to a complete quote that begins: "Lots of different things can bring on headaches. Most headaches are related to: stress, dehydration..." This DAFS approach of becoming the first—and last—stop for a search query extends to a redesign of the Ask.com site.