June 12, 2006

A division of InfoSearch Media Inc., Answerbag today announces that Ask Jeeves' co-founder and former CTO, along with natural-language expert David Warthen have both joined the company to better focus on advanced question answering and search systems.

Populated with information on a wide-variety of topics, Answerbag is a highly accurate and trusted online social question and answer community.

"David Warthen was the visionary and driving force behind the advanced lab of people-based question and answering at Ask Jeeves. At Answerbag, he has the unique opportunity to combine early pioneering work with fresh innovations, based on Web 2.0 principles," said George Lichter, CEO of InfoSearch Media.

"I am exceptionally pleased to be working with David again, and I feel confident that his fluency in technology, innovation and fundamental belief that people, not machines, possess the unique quality of judgment will provide Answerbag with the key advantage in taking search to the next level."

As an independent social question and answer site, Answerbag has established a reputation as a trustworthy collection of information created by people who have experience and knowledge to share with people looking for direct answers to their questions. Unlike competitors, including Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag builds trust by rewarding its users only for providing high quality answers.

"The next major step in the evolution of search unlocks the power of people providing judgment and collective wisdom, rather than simply introducing algorithms of increasing complexity," said David Warthen. "For more than three years, Answerbag has been a dynamic force in furthering social Q&A, and I am excited to help extend this lead to provide social Q&A infrastructure for the entire Web."

Mr. Warthen has been at the forefront of developing innovative software technologies for more than 20 years. As CTO and co-founder of Ask Jeeves, Mr. Warthen created a unique "people-oriented" approach to information retrieval, which helped redefine the search engine landscape and positioned Ask Jeeves as the leader in the Question Answering category.

After his tenure at Ask Jeeves, Mr. Warthen founded the innovative Web cam video game company Eye Games (www.eyegames.com), and has served on several Board of Directors, including the question-answering technology company kozoru (www.kozoru.com), which provides personalized instant messaging search.

At Answerbag, Mr. Warthen will focus on developing Answerbag's information architecture and enhancing Answerbag's question answering technology and social search systems.

"As algorithmic search became more prevalent, many of the early insights regarding people-based question and answering went unused. Through the pioneering efforts of sites like Naver in Korea, Answerbag in the U.S. and more recently Yahoo Answers, people are once again a big part of the future of search," continued Lichter.

"With David's help, we plan to tap those early insights to drive search and online social interaction even further."

Source: Yahoo News