Is Ask your default search engine? You can double-check that setting here: Change your default search settings in Firefox.

I don't think an Ask search engine plugin is included with Firefox, so that must have been added on somehow. You may need to replace the existing plugin with a new one. Here's one way:

(1) Open your preferred Ask site, for example http://www.ask.com/

(2) Check Firefox's search bar (the one up on the main toolbar) for a green "+" circle on the magnifying glass indicating that the site has a search engine plugin Firefox can load

(3) If you see that, click the icon and then on the panel that drops down, click the button to add that search engine (see screen shot attached)

I didn't see a similar plugin when I visited https://uk.ask.com/ so if you prefer that site (UK results?) you can consider the UK Ask options on the following page:

http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=ask

Thanks jsher2000, but Ask.com was my default search engine up to the last Firefox update, because I chose to add it to Firefox. Since then Ask.com always returns error 404 page not found when I try to use it either as default or from the Firefox search bar. I searched using the word "Drive" in Firefox search via Ask.com which then gave error 404 and showed the web address: http://uk.ask.com/ar?siteid=10000906&qsrc=999&l=dis&q=drive

Firefox added the characters /ar?siteid=10000906&qsrc=999&l=dis&q Is that the cause of my difficulty? Thank you for suggesting that I add uk.ask.com from mycroftproject.com IT WORKS! The UK version for Ask is not available via Firefox search engines. Thank you for your advice.

Hi Grrrrhwll, I don't know whether those parameters came from. I suspect it was an "affiliate" link that Ask paid someone to get into your browser, and those codes rang their register. The base page is gone now, so even without the query string (the ? mark and following) it yield a missing page error:

http://uk.ask.com/ar