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Ask Jeeve
built 209 days ago
Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves all are sporting customized logos for the holiday season. When you go to Yahoo.com and click on the top center logo it takes you to http://events.yahoo.com/holiday05/. When you go to Google.com and click on the middle center logo it takes you to Google's first of many holiday season doodles at http://www.google.com/doodle10.html (more to come). And if you go to Ask.com and click on the Jeeves logo, it takes you to a search results page (as a search engine should, imo) for http://www.ask.com/web?q=Happy+Holidays. Now Ask was sporting a snowman logo yesterday, so they are changing things up, possibly daily for the holiday season, keep and eye on them and Google for logo changes.
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Replacing the butler in ads will be a theme that claims Ask Jeeves is "an easier, more intuitive search." The company will be spending an estimated $3 million marketing the idea this year. Forbes.com: Searching Google Where's Jeeves?
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Since the question and answer process is either somewhat automated through their natural language processing methods or provided by fellow users, the Ask Jeeves service seems to fail many of the evaluation criteria used in by the VRD. However, the target audience of this service is fundamentally different. The target audience for Ask Jeeves is more acustom to using a search engine for the information they're looking for, and may not want direct assistance by a "service". It does meet the goal of reference stated in the first paragraph above, so it may be good to classify it as a reference service. However, the quality of that service is questionable.
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As a search engine, Ask Jeeves currently ranks only fifth in terms of use with a 7.0 percent market share, according to a June Nielsen//NetRatings report. Still, there's plenty about it that appeals to advertisers aside from the upcoming advertising opportunities. The engine ranked fourth in a customer satisfaction survey, beating out AOL. It ... experienced a 37 percent increase in search queries in Q2 2003 over 2002, when industry growth leveled out at 10 percent overall.
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The Ask Jeeve’s owned RSS aggregation service Bloglines is off line again at the time of writing (07:00 GMT). The Bloglines plumber is appearing on site with a notice that the site is down “for a little fixer upper” and will be back running at 1am US Pacific Time.
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A thread was created at WebmasterWorld forums named Has ASK Jeeves Updated its Index? but moderator martinibuster. Martinibuster says that he has noticed that Ask.com has been sending him traffic for a page that is about ten days old. That implies that Ask.com's index, which is normally slower to index new pages than Google, Yahoo or MSN, has become fresh with new pages. Martinibuster ... believes that Ask.com has "tweaked their algo" to provide higher quality results. For the few searches martinibuster placed, he said the quality is on par with Google and seems to be better than Yahoo results.
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