Ask Jeeves Opens European Research Center
Ask Jeeves has opened an European research center in Pisa, Italy as Ask Jeeves works to build upon its presence in Europe. Ask recently launched two European search sites, Ask Espana and Ask Deutschland, with additional European launches planned later this year (let’s be really creative here and guess Italy).
“Ask Jeeves research and development team is continually striving to develop the most innovative and useful technologies for our users,” said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Ask Jeeves. “The creation of a research center in Italy will allow us to access the broadest pool of talented professionals across Europe, while helping the company to further advance its world-class technology for users worldwide.”
The new European Research Center is lead by Antonio Gulli, who is the creator of Italys first search engine, Arianna. In addition to being the braintrust of the Ask European expanison, the Ask Jeeves European research center will support all of Ask Jeeves search sites, including the flagship Ask.com.
With broad expertise in machine learning, social networking, data mining, information retrieval and other theories and technologies, the team in Italy will contribute to all aspects of the Ask Jeeves search engine, including its unique ranking methodology, which leverages topic clusters on the Web to determine relevance; vertical search technologies, like image and news; and application-level features, such as Zoom related search.
