I no longer work for Ask.com

It's official. After a long period in Ask.com, it's now time to work on something different.

More thant 4 years ago, I started with a small team of people soon expanded into the first Ask.com European R&D Center. Pisa has been selected as location for the excellent quality of life and for the good concentration of software engineers and academic researchers. Our office was magnificent, as you can see from this collection of pictures (1, 2, 3).

Different Pisa teams worked on various projects:

• Image Search, co-lead -- "Ask new image search is a step ahead in a notoriously tricky area. With the quality of its image search results, combined with the new Zoom query refinement feature, I'll be using it as my default image search service going forward", SearchEngineWatch


• News and Blog search, co-lead -- "Ask.com has a pretty original approach to the old-time, old-school, traditional maybe, view of news.", Techcrunch


• Video News Search, lead -- "it's interesting that they've managed to integrate the video playing right into the main page since I doubt all the source videos are the same format (Flash, aspx, etc.)", Niraj user comment
  

• DailyBeast, Tina Brown's news site, co-lead -- "How did IAC/Tina Brown's new Daily Beast do in its first month? Pretty well: The company says it attracted 2.3 million unique monthly visitors and served up 11.4 million page views. A great start for any publishing startup, Alleyinsider.

• Core Web Search Infrastructure; Pisa was involved in the design and implementation of the middleware software providing the base of all the Ask.com search products. A number of people in Pisa worked on this project.

• RealTime Fresh Web Ranking, lead; injecting and ranking fresh news, video and blogs into Web search results in realtime.
  

• Frontend Platform for UK, Pisa was involved in the Jeeves rebranding in UK. A number of people in Pisa worked on this project.
  

• A bunch of Search Patents, "Ask.com has been working hard since then at making itself a more useful resource for timely news information, and has started incorporating multimedia into that mix.", Seobythesea

Note that the above list includes some of the projects carried out by people that I hired in Pisa.

I posted different blogs pointing out some differentiating aspects of our technology:

• Real Time Query Expansion -- Query Logs vs News
• Fresh Correlations, a valid data source
• What is the status of swine flu?
• What is happening in Washington ? real time text a...
• Fresh Correlations: Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lore...
• Fiat , Chrysler deal done: news, video, blog and i...
• Real Time Gossip: Susan Boyle
• Fresh answers and old ones
• Real time Semantic Search
• American Idol: Freshness, Variety and UI

Working in Ask.com was an amazing experience since the enviroment is very productive. Anyway, Ask.com recognizes your hard work. In 2007 I received the IAC Emerging Leader Award, and 2006 IAC Horizon Award, for being a top performer above and beyond the expectation.

I want to thank Pisa team for the impressive work we carried out together. I also want to thank all the people from other offices world wide (Edison, NJ ; Oakland & Campbell, CA; London, UK; Dublin, Ireland; Hangzhou, China). In no particular order: Kelly, Jim, Apostolos, Tomasz, Yufan, Yihan, Doug, Rona, Navid, Chuck, Tuoc, Nitin, Alex, Eric, Andy, Erik, Miguel, Dominic, Steve, Padriac, Peter, James, Michael, Juanita, John, Mary, Kurt, Brendan, Michelle, Danica, Amy, Cassie and so many other people that is difficult to mention in a small blog posting.

I am fortunate to have worked with many bright, talented teams. I learned a lot from them.