Ask.Com expands web-based smart answers across new categories

Ask.com today announced several partnerships to drive the expansion of Smart Answers across new categories, enabling people to more easily find actual answers- not links - while searching on topics like sports, recipes, travel and music.

Ask has partnered with leading brands including Sports Network, Lonely Planet, Calorie Counter, IGN Entertainment and Lyrics.com to power the new Smart Answers, which contain an exact answer to a user’s question, right at the top of the page. Smart Answers work in concert with Ask.com’s Q&A user community, currently in limited beta, to offer answers from a wealth of sources - both published data and a community of real people - all in one place.

To ensure quality, Ask.com generates Smart Answers from a select pool of content partners carefully vetted based on criteria like authority, relevance and subject matter depth. Natural language processing is used to match exact answers to specific questions.

The food, sports and health categories are some of the most popular on Ask.com. By ensuring more answers across these categories, Ask is continuing its investment in its Q&A experience, which is believed to have contributed to an almost 10 percent increase in user satisfaction scores since last year, according to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index, the largest jump for any search engine or portal studied.

Ask.com Smart Answers currently address millions of questions, sourced from existing partners such as Weather Underground and Healthline. Examples include:

-- How many calories are in an apple?

-- When does Modern Warfare 3 come out?

-- What is the average nurse salary?

-- What are some things to do in Paris?

-- What’s the MPG for a Toyota Prius?

-- What time is sunset?

-- Who is the CEO of Bank of America?

-- How high was the tsunami in Japan?