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Oakland, California - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - January 25, 2006 - Search engine, Ask Jeeves, Inc., has launched its first proprietary image search technology,available at: http://pictures.ask.com. The new technology debuts Ask Jeeves’ first internally-created index of web images, further improvements to its image search ranking algorithms and new Zoom related search suggestions specifically for image searching.

According to the company, the improvements deliver a superior image search experience, helping people find the pictures they are looking for faster.

Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves, Inc. commented, ”Image search is the second-leading type of search on Ask Jeeves after web search. The improvements we are introducing today move the needle for searchers where they really need it.”

Image Search accounts for 16% of all searches on Ask Jeeves. With the new image technology, Ask Jeeves is also expanding Image Smart Answers, which appear at the top of the search results page for queries such as “pictures of Mount St. Helens” from the main web channel.

All picture results can be saved to users’ MyJeeves by clicking the ’save’ link under each image. MyJeeves is a personal search service where links to web pages, images and selected Smart Answers can be stored, organized, annotated, searched and shared.

According to Apostolos Gerasoulis, Executive Vice President of Search Technology for Ask Jeeves, ”Image search is an important technical challenge to solve for our users. We find that, as we concentrate our efforts on providing first-class relevance and tools for image searching, the usage of the Pictures channel on Ask.com steadily continues to grow.”

Ask Jeeves’ new Image Search includes improved ranking algorithms, patent-pending image recognition technologies and, for the first time, a proprietary image index.

Mr. Gerasoulis added, ”Our new image search combines Ask Jeeves’ unique text ranking and clustering algorithms with sophisticated image recognition technologies and our new image index. Our goal is to give users the best technology and tools to get the most out of the Image Web.”

The image search technology utilizes Ask Jeeves’ unique algorithmic search ranking, which clusters the Web into topic areas and determines the authoritativeness of pages and images among their topic community. This approach requires additional computations beyond that of other ranking methodologies that simply evaluate the popularity of pages and images on the Web at large. Ask Jeeves combines this methodology with new sophisticated image recognition technologies to further increase relevance.

These patent-pending recognition technologies measure a wide variety of image attributes, such as image type, shape, brightness and contrast level to determine picture quality. The combination returns extremely relevant, high quality images for unparalleled visual relevance. New Zoom Related Search: Concept Navigation for Images Zoom related search is a proprietary concept that gives users suggestions on how to narrow or expand their search.

This concept, introduced for the Web Search channel in May of 2005, has now been expanded and tailored for the Image Search channel. As with Zoom for Web search, the product is derived from the Ask Jeeves’ search engine, which uniquely clusters the Web by topic as part of its relevance methodology.

To learn more about Ask Jeeves, please visit: www.ask.com.

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