Ask in France, European expansion Options

[Nadir]

Ask Jeeves have released a Beta version of their Search engine last week in France, they have decided to use the brand "Ask" instead of "Ask Jeeves", maybe because Jeeves is not a name in France!

The main feature of this SE that I do appreciate is that it only shows you results from pages written in French by default. No it's not a nationalist comment, it's just that compared to other search engines in France, if you type in a keyword that is the same in another language, it will serve you pages from France by default.

For example, if you go to Google.fr and type in "marketing internet" ("internet marketing" in English) , Google will display only English pages as it's set to "Web" by default. If you want to have only pages written in French, you have to set your language option to french. Ask apparently understood this little problem and came up with something different that Google. They even separated pages written in French (that can be in France, Canada, Belgium or else) and pages located in France (based on the IP address of the site).

When you do a search on Ask France, you can either choose "Pages in French", "Pages from France", or "All the Web", this feature was so far also available on Yahoo and MSN but non-existing in Google, pretty weird for the 1st SE in the world!

However, as for the results of the rankings, it seems that Ask still have improvements to do.

[rustybrick]

It is also http://es.ask.com/ and http://ask.jp/

But http://uk.ask.com/ does have "Jeeves" written out.

[EfSaNe]

http://nl.ask.com
http://de.ask.com

.....

[SerkaN]

Thank you Hemşo

[LauraMonti]

I heard Google own ask.com, I wouldn't be surprised though. Ask is already displaying adwords on the search engine.

[joedolson]

Google does NOT own Ask. Ask.com is owned by IAC/Interactive.

Ask has contracted with Google to provide their contextual advertising, but this is basically equivalent to any other publisher who makes use of Google's AdSense - albeit, with (I'm sure) a very different business model at that level.