Thursday, August 20, 2009

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:
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.

9 comments:

  1. Antonio,
    Was just talking about you last night and was going to email you today to catch up. I hope you are well and I know great things are ahead for you and your group.

    Kelly

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  2. This is really sad for Ask.com but I'm not surprised. What will be your new project, Antonio?

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  3. good luck :)
    (dove te ne vai di bello?)

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  4. Hi Antonio,

    I expect that you'll be missed at Ask. You and your team came out with some very interesting and useful innovations.

    Good luck in whatever you decide to tackle next.

    Bill

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  5. Best of luck with the new endeavors, Antonio! it was great working with you on the blog & PRONOUNCE THE K.

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  6. All the best for your future endeavors! It was great working with you too.

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  7. I learned most of what I know about text mining, clustering, and ranking results of text searches from Antonio and his team, and this has served me well in a few of my current project. I would describe Antonion's Pisa Ask.com group as "A great team with great ideas" and would recommend any of them, collectively or individually.
    - James Jeude

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  8. I joined Microsoft, and will work on Bing Search technology leading all the engineering development for UX and verticals in Europe.

    http://codingplayground.blogspot.com/2009/08/i-joined-microsoft-new-search.html

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