Ask.com introduced Ask Mobile (http://mobile.ask.com ), a new service for searching the Web from mobile devices. Designed to minimize keystrokes, increase navigability on small displays and accelerate page loads, Ask Mobile offers a special interface and search tools to help searchers find what they are looking for faster.

Ask Mobile offers links to key search categories directly from the home page, making it easier to navigate to relevant results. The design saves significant keystrokes for many searches; for example, looking for the weather in the 94114 zip code requires 50 percent fewer keystrokes on Ask Mobile compared to mobile products offered by other major search engines. Fewer keystrokes is an extremely important concept when considering the difficulty of typing on mobile devices and the absence of full-sized keyboards.

Ask Mobile utilizes Skweezer technology that "skweezes" Web pages to present content in a format that is easier to view and navigate on small displays and increases download speed. With the Skweezer technology, Ask Mobile allows more access to Web content by allowing pages to load that would otherwise be too memory-intensive for most mobile devices.

Powered by Ask.com's proprietary ExpertRank algorithmic search technology, Ask Mobile provides users with highly-relevant search results, bringing authoritative sites within their topic community to the top of the results page, rather than simply ranking sites by their link popularity on the Web at large.

Ask Mobile provides direct access to important mobile search categories on the home page, including Web Search, Directions, Images, Business Listings, Maps, Weather, Bloglines, Area Codes, Currency Conversion, Horoscope and Time Zones. Additional services, such as sport scores and movie times, will follow the initial rollout.

Ask Mobile is available immediately at http://mobile.ask.com .