Oakland, California - ( Website Hosting Directory ) - February 6, 2006 - Search engine company, Ask Jeeves, Inc., has formally announced the opening of a research center in Pisa, Italy. The research center will serve as Ask Jeeves' European hub for search technology research and development, working directly with the company's U.S.-based research centers in Campbell, California and Piscataway, New Jersey.

The formation of the research center furthers Ask Jeeves' presence in Europe. The launch of the research center comes on the heels of Ask's launching of two European web search sites, Ask Espana and Ask Deutschland. The company has said that it expects to launch additional European sites later this year.

According to Apostolos Gerasoulis, Executive Vice President of Search Technology at Ask Jeeves, ''Ask Jeeves' research and development team is continually striving to develop the most innovative and useful technologies for our users. 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.''

Lead by Antonio Gulli, an expert in search engine technology and the creator of Italy's first search engine, Arianna, 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.

Mr. Gulli added, ''Our European team has already made great strides in the continued innovation around Ask Jeeves search, and this new research center will fuel further development of useful and innovative search products for our users.''

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

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