Ask.com is furthering its trek back to its Q&A roots, announcing a new product today. Launching in private beta (request an invite here), Ask.com is testing the new version of its site. Participants will be able to have more direct interaction with Ask.com, as the search engine will be drawing from its community of 87 million monthly uniques.

Ask an actual question, and Jeeves “himself” will be able to respond. That’s right. Ask.com has added the human touch–this time it’s for real. From the Ask.com blog,

Proprietary technology designed for Q&A: Our semantic approach is not simply re-purposed search technology. We’ve taken the last year to enhance our offering to locate the most relevant, high-quality answer and display it right at the top of page (surfing through 10 blue links not required).

Largest index of questions and answers – 500 million “pairs” and growing: As the number one brand for asking questions, we have the world’s largest index of questions and answers with the ability to extract questions and matching answers from hundreds and thousands of Web sources.

The human element: To make our community the most effective, Ask.com has the ability to route questions to relevant people based on interests and expertise. This means only the right people will be asked to answer a specific question, reducing spam and question fatigue. Responses from our community will also be indexed and available (depending on level of freshness and relevance) to address future questions posed on Ask.com.

New look and feel: Our site now makes it abundantly clear we are razor-focused on empowering our users to ask and answer questions. You can now access trending information, including the day’s most popular questions, across multiple areas of the site.

In the grand scheme of things, Ask.com is still behind on the trend. Mahalo and ChaCha have been experimenting with human-powered search results in a rather direct sense for some time, while Google’s Aardvark acquisition and Facebook’s Questions testing indicate larger networks’ desire to leverage human interactions as well. Microsoft Bing added a social front early on, too.

As a whole, the real-time trend has started a demand for filtered social search, simultaneously gauging a topic’s importance and relevance to an individual. Wolfram Alpha has also begun to apply artificial intelligence to consumer search. All of these initiatives seek to solve queries, not just search for their fragments.

The key for Ask.com is to regain the natural language the search engine initially sought after–leveraging community interactions is currently one of the best options for the company. The past year has been spent building up to this moment, testing various methods of growing its brand and retaining new users. Last year’s return of Jeeves’ character re-introduced a human-like face to an online search tool, and the launch of Ask.com’s Question of the Day encourages user interaction (read: engagement).