Ask plans to go beyond traditional Web search and rank what Leeds calls “potential content” including the million questions a day the service gets. “If the answer hasn’t been published on the Web, rather than wait for spidering, let’s be proactive,” said Leeds.

While the details are sketchy and Ask doesn’t want to give too much away, Leeds said it plans to build a community of experts and trusted sources to answer many of the queries that typically stump search engines. He said the details of integrating the public Ask.com site with the community is the secret sauce no one else has created yet. “We’ll say more when we’re closer to rolling this out, but what I can say is it’ll be intuitive, simple to use and all in one place.”

There is no public release date, but Leeds said it’s definitely on track for the first half of 2010.

“If I ask ‘What’s the best way to get from San Francisco to Foster City without using Highway 101?’ A search engine result is going to be a lot of garbage, but a person who’s done that drive would have the answer and these are the types of questions people have every day,” said Leeds. “When this works at scale we should get answers back relatively quickly, just like something provocative posted on Facebook gets an immediate response.”

He’s also quick to add that Ask isn’t giving up on the low hanging fruit of traditional search, but is eager to put new ideas in play.

“The additional functionality of being able to understand what you’re asking, that’s where we’re doubling down and betting the future of this company,” said Leeds who detailed some of these ideas in a recent blog post.