According to the article no it's not like ask.com . Search engines like ask.com and Google return results based on what they think the value of a page is based on a variety of things like the page title, what other pages link to it, the contents of the page, the link text of what links to it and many, many other things. In a perfect world Search Engines would return some very good results but since how these page values are calculated is known to some degree people (like myself

) try to attain better rankings. This can corrupt the results, many pages on the internet that are some of the best material available are buried because the author can care less...
This project if I'm reading it correctly is basically AI, you ask it a question and it returns an answer based on what it already knows. You may for example be familiar with
A.L.I.C.E., this is a AI engine to some degree because it can carry a conversation but it's not really AI as it's knowledge is only based on what is stored in the database. It can't "think" but instead returns a predetermined answer. What differs about this project is that it can
calculate answers or think based on already known knowledge.