Ask.com announced that it has acquired Ask.fm, a social Q&A service, which has over 180 million global monthly users, according to the company.

Ask.fm is available on the web, and for Android and IOS.

A post on the Ask blog says:

Ask.com has been in the business of finding answering to questions from millions of people over the course of our 18 years, and we are proud that as a result we’ve built our brand to become synonymous with Q&A online. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that as Ask.fm started gaining increasingly significant traction over the past 18 months, we became concerned about the potential to confuse users. Accordingly, we considered, even pursued, several different courses of action; but all the while, becoming much more familiar with the product and its various use cases.

What also was, and has been, abundantly clear, is that the need to materially enhance safety on the Ask.fm site is paramount – critical, really, to unlocking the service’s true potential. And the good news, is we’ve already started the process of making changes on the safety front, on day one of acquisition. – See more at: http://blog.ask.com/#sthash.tKjrF3ZH.dpuf

The company is putting in place a new leadership team aimed at instilling a “safety-first” philosophy. lya and Mark Terebin from Ask.fm will no longer be involved in the operations or ownership structure of the company, Ask says. They’ve hired Chief Trust and Safety Officer Catherine Teitelbaum, formerly Director of Safety at Yahoo, to “drive global Ask.fm trust and safety initiatives.”

More on safety-related efforts in the blog post.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A couple years ago, Ask acquired About.com, another popular site providing answers to many of the world’s questions. The price on that one was $300 million

Image via Ask.fm