Ask Jeeves knocking on Japan's door
News.com
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5321080.html

The butler is ready to take on the Japanese market with the launch of Ask Jeeves Japan.

Ask Jeeves on Monday unveiled a Japanese Web site, the search company's first international venture in four years.

The fifth-largest search site in the United States has formed a joint enterprise with Tokyo-based software company Transcosmos to launch the site, called Ask Jeeves Japan. The Emeryville, Calif.-based company, founded in 1996 as a specialist in natural-language queries, last branched out overseas when it entered the United Kingdom in 2000, before the dot-com collapse.

You are too fast Gary. I hope we see a lot more international expansion from Jeeves. If Yahoo and Google go all over the world why can't Jeeves? For that matter why doesn't Jeeves take iWon and MyWay international too? Most of the world's media consumption is outside of the US.

Thanks for the kind words Muscle 13.
:)

We're trying.

I really like what Jeeves is up to these days with their Smart Search technology.
From the researcher angle (the one I'm coming from) providing direct links to quality sources OR even providing an answer directly on the results page (for certain types of ready reference queries) is exciting stuff. I'm interested to see how they will implement the CitySearch data they now have acess to.


In this article (http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2004/08/23/focus1.html) a review of the search industry, (also new today (-;) the Jeeves CEO says,
"Search is still in its early days," he says. "This is just the second inning of the ball game."
I agree.

Here is the official press release (http://www.irconnect.com/askjinc/pages/news_releases.html?d=62839).

"This is the first in what will be a long process of international expansion for the company," Lanzone said.

http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=30209

Lanzone said further international expansion is now in the works.

"Near to mid-term, you'll see us launching in Asia and Europe. When we do so, we're not going to do it capriciously. We're going to build country specific search indexes... There's a significant lack of choice in many marketplaces," he said.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3399701

We in Canada are anxiously awaiting our own version of Ask Jeeves, called "Ask Jeeves, eh?" It would be a huge hit.