Search Engine Info

Ask Deals: Your One-Click, One-Stop Shop for Savings is Here!

Category : Other Search Engines | 1253 views | 2009-10-06 08:30:00

Consider this: a tough economy with new, record job losses. Families gathered around kitchen tables with a pencil and calculator trying to make ends meet – every week.  The fact that ‘coupons’ was the sixth most searched for term on Ask in 2008 – and that the number of queries for value-related terms shot up almost 50% so far in 2009.

And, according to comScore, nearly 60% of consumers now cite they are using coupons more often to reduce their shopping expenses – with more than half of them getting coupons from online services.

It’s a perfect recipe for a unique and timely offering like Ask Deals, which we’ve launched today on Ask.com.

To meet the need of our users – and help lift a burden – we’ve developed Ask Deals as a robust, comprehensive and user-friendly way to get coupons and deals of all kinds on the Web for this upcoming shopping season.

Ask Deals cuts through the clutter of invalid, expired, and low-value offers with a database of more than 1 million high-quality, usable offers – refreshed and updated multiple times a day

Ask Deals does many things at once:

--It serves-up all the Web’s best deals in one place. It aggregates high-quality and best-savings offers on the web for hundreds of product categories

--It injects and blends deals right into your search experience, unlike other search engines

--Using Ask’s award-winning Zoom Related Search, it gives consumers additional great discounts on the right panel, next to core search results

--It allows searchers to immediately share the savings they find with family and friends via email, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter

--By choosing the Ask Deals homepage skin, you’ll also get compelling and timely savings offers, hand-picked by the Ask Deals editorial team, right on their search homepage…and, you can also sign up for our new “Deal of the Day” email.

Here's a look at the cool social media sharing feature in AskDeals:

Building on Ask’s legacy of innovation and cutting-edge technologies, Ask Deals uses proprietary “Deal Detector” technology to sift through the tens of millions of promotions, store circulars, and top online coupons & deals sites to give you one-click savings. By crawling message boards, user-generated content and blogs, we’ll find the popular savings that are moving among users at any given moment.

Ask Deals is the only search engine that actually integrates, blends, and injects them right into your search results – saving you time from clicking through endless links by providing the best deals, the first time every time, front-and-center at the top of the page.

Here is the walkthrough of some of the features for this product release.

When the user intent is explicit about coupon and deals query we will blend results using our proprietary Smart Answers technology. Here's an example of a “cheap Halloween costumes” query - we show it as the #1 result on the search page.

When the user intent is less direct, we'll inject the results in lower ordinal and give suggested links from our Deals Channel.  Here's another example: for the query “sears”, we show the Deals Channel link on the top, and the coupon and deal unit in lower ordinal.

In order to further help users, we use our proprietary Zoom Related Search technology to give query suggestions. Below, see an example for the query “printable coupon", where we give Money Saving Searches for related queries on the top right panel.

We hope you enjoy Ask Deals – just in time for the shopping season at the end of a tough 2009.  We’re excited about this special, seasonal vertical that will be available through the end of the year, and perhaps beyond, if our users love it. We think they will, and we look forward to your feedback.

Thanks for reading – and ‘asking’ for savings! We’re happy to deliver.

- Ankur Choksi,

Director of Search Technology, Ask.com