What are your preferred methods of using the Internet to get answers? Some actually type their question into the URL field instead of typing an http address. Really! Others go to Google, Yahoo!, Dogpile, AOL, MetaCrawler, etc. Remember AskJeeves.com?

Ask.com, with 2 % of the search market and number four search engine, is launching a social network today. It will enable people to survey others using Ask. As many as 87 million people visit ASK each month.

But, searching for something versus asking a question are two different activities.

Ask’s search technology classifies and ranks answers. To start, it will be an invite-only network. Everyone involved will vote on the answers they think are best which creates the ever-evolving rank.

The Ask search box has three sections. Type your request in the search box and submit. Keywords will appear: “We’ll get you answers from people who know about … “. The keywords link to profiles of people who are willing to answer questions.

The question gets to hang around looking for answers for seven days. When any answer receives a thumbs up positive, the question and answer get to be top dog until another comes along.

The company has a few dozen live human moderators to pay attention to the site and rid it of inappropriate questions and answers. Where do they draw the line on that? A “careful and slow rollout” is meant to ensure quality, according to Scott Garell, who was named president of Ask Networks in May 2009.

“Ask’s heritage has always been about answering questions – in fact, more people associate Ask with answering questions than any other brand in the world,” said Doug Leeds, President, Ask.com, US. “As users continue to embrace the social Web, now is the perfect time to extend Ask’s technology beyond finding pages that have answers to finding people who do as well. With 87 million monthly users and more than a decade of Q&A experience, Ask.com is uniquely positioned to answer the long tail of questions that are impossible for search engines alone to address.”

Watch on your iPhone and later Android around October 2010 for an Ask mobile application which will be available for integration on one’s Facebook profile. Social activity online is already mixed with search. When was the last time readers searched Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin for answers?

Word up is that Ask will not charge brands for “sponsored answers” any time soon, but that is likely to change because money talks and money is how we put food on our tables.

More information on ASK Beta is at http://mashable.com/2010/07/27/ask-beta/. And… request an Invite today at http://www.ask.com/invite.