Ask.com is a small player. i wish there were more smaller players like that to compete with Big Google, which in turn will benefit us the consumers...
It's still doing ok, i use it now and then for specific searches and last time i looked it has 3,9% of the internet SE share, thats more than AOL fyi.
Ask.com is running a big marketing campaign with Nascar now, I was surprised when I saw it, but they are still fighting and obviously working. For the longest time I thought it was just a Google gateway.
Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. include all your RSS feeds in your sitemapindex.xml read http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/my_stuff.shtml and http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml that includes all information you need just as all others if you care FOR search engines, the SE care for you! I get a decent and increasing traffic from ask.com, somewhere in the range of many hundreds UV/day
I never use them.... I took a look at it now and seems like their search results are a better than they were a few years ago.