For Ask.com CEO, Jim Lanzone, collective search is more important than personalisation. A radical opposite view from its competitors, like Google and Yahoo, which are trying to push personalisation to its limits by "collecting" more and more personal information about their users, at the risk of some kind of privacy breach.

"People don't want to take all the trouble to set anything, let alone advanced search. They are going to expect that one box, whether it's on their TV or their phone or their laptop, to deliver what they're looking for, in any given time [...] I've learned it's hard to get people to customise. It's hard to get them to even read directions. The number of people that will personalise their page is not a mass-market number. The bigger challenge is what you can do for billions of people."

So what's collective search? In his Q&A session this morning at the Search Engine Strategies conference, Ask.com CEO also mentioned the "Edison" project to merge its different search technologies - Teoma ExpertRank, for automatically gouging the relevance of Web sites to particular searches and DirectHit, which calculates the popularity of searches based on the number of clicks users make - under a one combined service that will also add the "collectiveness" and allow people to get different search results based on affinity groups or communities.

"I think that personalization has gone overboard in some areas. The sweet spot of enhancing the value of the results is on the collective. That's something we're focusing on in our Edison algorithm. Collective is important and personalisation is at a sub level.

Lanzone also had an interesting view of the future of search as a "personal device":

"Search is this on-demand tool that you use every day to find phone numbers, make reservations and find things on-demand 90% of search is done in a hurry when you need something right now. And that's only going to get worse. Search is going to be your personal navigation device for the next several decades. "

In an interview after the session, Lanzone confirmed that Ask will stay squarely focused on search and not on providing services like email, hosting, etc...

"Now with our MyStuff feature you can save images, pages and soon videos. But we're not going to be an infrastructure provider. We'll focus just on search and we might give some unique names for our different vertical search services."

Finally, Ask 3D's international roll out is going as fast as possible:

"Google's internal roll out schedule is 18 months to go International. So we try to do it as fast as we can but with Ask 3D that hits structured databases (news, video sources...). And to get it on these international fronts, takes a lot of work and we don't want to roll it out half-way. "