For me, Ask Jeeves, is a search engine that has so much potential, that it kills me to see them sit back and follow the leaders.

But Ask has been through hard times, only to establish itself as Apple Computer of the search business. Chris Sherman was quoted in an article by Chris Gaither named Which Search Engine Firm Is Coming Back? (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jeeves24dec24,0,6274183.story?coll=la-home-business) as saying; "They have very small share, but it's a very dedicated group of people who use them."

Ask Jeeves' condition grew dire as rival Google rose to fame across the San Francisco Bay in Mountain View. After signing the 10-year, $80-million lease to move its rapidly expanding staff to Oakland, Ask Jeeves posted a loss of $189 million, laid off more than half its employees and paid $16 million to get out of the lease.

So when I asked in the Meet the Crawlers session (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3356) in the Q & A session:
Q: I asked Ask Jeeves why they bury the Teoma results way under the Google AdWords results at Ask Jeeves?
A: Michael answered that is was not about not being more relevant, they feel Teoma is more relevant than AdWords. But it is set up that way from a monetization standspoint only. Fair answer.

The answer is because Google saved them from their financial distress, as the article says:

In 2002, Google and Ask Jeeves inked a three-year deal to place $100 million worth of ads on Ask.com. The two companies shared the money advertisers paid whenever people clicked on those ads, known as sponsored links. The alliance has since been extended to 2007.

With that money, they made some major advancements to Teoma (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=1746).

Loyalty comes from what? Brand? Quality?

Can Ask Jeeves get beyond their current market share? Do they want to or are they happy with their current position?

This might come as a bold statement, but of the major search engines (Google and Yahoo, even MSN), Ask Jeeves plays the smallest role in communication with our industry (SEM). Yes they go to the conferences but it is the little things they miss. Yahoo and Google read the SEM blogs, participate (or better yet, read) the forums. Ask, I think does less in that way.

What will it take? Is it possible? Will it happen? Does it matter? :)

Like many, I've always thought highly of Teoma and the team behind it.

However, I don't have much new to say about Ask Jeeves as a company. In spite of its relatively healthy market valuation -- I believe this is because the company does generate good cash as a kind of pragmatic PPC advertising holding company, more so now that it owns Excite and iWon or what have you -- the company lacks direction in the search arena.

Experts excitedly point to new search-related projects at companies like Amazon and IBM. No one is talking about Ask Jeeves in that vein.

If Ask Jeeves doesn't do anything related to the natural-language question-answering they promised to pioneer when they launched, then the whole enterprise degenerates into a debate amongst top management and a succession of ad agencies about the relative importance of the butler.

I'm told Ask Jeeves does well in the UK. Maybe, but for how long? Can a cute brand alone compete in a technological field? I doubt it. The comparison with Apple doesn't do justice to Apple, which is one of the world's great, innovative companies.

Teoma is a good search engine, but so is Google. So is Yahoo Search. So might be MSN Search. Jeeves needed to do something different, and it needed to do it regularly and impressively. I'll pay attention when the company's share of monthly searches exceeds 5% in the United States.

Ask is a very conflicted puppy. It began with very simple but marketable innovations ('natural language' questions proven originally through AV, and the DirectHit 'click popularity' algo, etc) which had flaws. The strength was definitely in the marketing rather than the tech.

Ask used to provide some very different results for a while (back in around 2000) which while not relevant enough to most questions to make it a primary engine choice, did make it one of my backup engines for further research.

It suffered the same fate that so many dot-com boomers did - it was wrecked by over-eagerness to make money. In no time, Ask was filled with nothing but PPC listings, and effectively killed off for anything but shopping related searches.

Ask had the exceptional good fortune and foresight to purchase one of the very best search engine technologies known however - Teoma. The quality at least rivalled Google, and indeed often surpassed it, and the only obstacle between Teoma and the unquestioned glory it deserved what that its database was smaller than Google's. It just needed to index more. Nothing else.

But, the desperation for cash that hit so many dot-com boomers hit this. Rather than let Teoma grow as it should, Ask insisted on tethering it by trying to turn into a pay-for-indexing engine. This was an unforgivable error of judgement, and in my opinion, is definitely responsible for Teoma not taking Google's place as the top engine in 2001/2002. Teoma had the technology, but had no pilot with the faith and vision.

The saddest waste I've ever seen in search.

Even if Ask hadn't hamstrung Teoma's growth by trying too hard to commercialise it too soon, they'd found another way to hamper it. Ask paid thousands for some impact studies on how the launch of Teoma might affect the revenue of AskJeeves. Naturally, they found that launching the worlds best search tech would probably have an adverse effect on the business of a third-rate PPC billboard that only had marketshare at all through expensive advertising. So they buried Teoma.

How dumb could these folks be?

This strikes me as being akin to a horse-farm deciding that they should not open the worlds first auto factory because it might cause them to sell less horses. A masterpiece of short-termism and lack of vision.

So, will Ask ever be a player again?

No. Not because of innovation, but because the problem is with those at the top, not those at the front-line. The management have no vision and no soul for search, and will continue to miss the woods for the trees.

Only a complete revamp of management could save Ask, and they lack the management to see that.

For me, Ask Jeeves, is a search engine that has so much potential, that it kills me to see them sit back and follow the leaders.
I think they've actually been the leader in some aspects. They've got personalization/search memory features that Google doesn't. They've long had great query refinement. Frankly, their particular algorithm seems a bit more link bomb resistant than others. Shortcut features, direct display of images, these are other areas where they've led.

Can Ask Jeeves get beyond their current market share? Do they want to or are they happy with their current position?
Well, they bought market share earlier this year. They might also incrementally gain through word of mouth. But it's going to be hard with three major players out there. Still, I think they've done an amazing job still getting a slice of the pie/being on the radar screen at all. Let's play "Where's Lycos" to see what they've avoided.

I dunno...

I've been happily using Teoma as my secondary search engine for some time now - if I can't find it on Google, I use Teoma next, Same with Yahoo.

This is because although their relevancy seems quite good, the number of sites they have indexed seems low and is affecting the search results. When you only have a small group of sites to choose from you are not as likely to find the best answer as you will when you have a larger selection. But up until recently their algo has been able to give results based on intelligence when pure quantity would not do it.

But lately I've been avoiding them. The results seem to be getting worse and worse - entire SERPS full of duplicate sites serving viruses, really odd results that have little to do with the search criteria, etc.

Add to that insult the wholesale sellout of Googles Ads, and it was a death blow. If I want to see Googles Ads, I'll search on Google, thanks.

IMO, unless they make some significant changes soon, starting with increasing their index of real sites and throwing out duplicates, they are in serious trouble.

Which is too bad - I kind of liked them as the underdog. But right now Teoma is more of a sickly poodle than a serious possibility.

Ian

Seems like many of you are saying the same thing.

I believe this is because the company does generate good cash as a kind of pragmatic PPC advertising holding company

In no time, Ask was filled with nothing but PPC listings, and effectively killed off for anything but shopping related searches.

Natural search, organic results, FREE results - are what make a search engine a major player in the industry. Google knows this, Yahoo does, and even MSN is jumping on the bandwagon.

For Ask to buy teoma, and let it sit and rot, symbolizes something.

Danny does have an excellent point, Ask is doing a wonderful job of "Shortcut features". I personally think they are doing a better job with that then Google, Yahoo and MSN. Will that make the difference?

It is hard to know, us SEMs don't have strong ties with Ask (IMO).

Myself, Chris Gaither of the LA Times and Paul Gardi of Jeeves/Teoma had dinner together in San Jose during SES. Chris usually covers the big dogs such as Google and Yahoo! but there was plenty to talk about for the future of Jeeves.

I don't think that Chris Sherman's analogy of Ask/Apple in the LA Times article is too far from the mark at all.

There's a whole lot of stuff going on technology wise at Teoma. In my opinion Apostolos Gerasoulis, the brain behind the Teoma algorithm took their search technology to a point where Google was following them for a while. Not the other way around.

It was his genius that cracked the run time analysis problem with Kleinberg's original HITS algorithm. Although Google seem not to want to comment on that very much at all. I was stunned when I realised that he'd managed to get a keyword dependant algorithm down to sub-second results. At first I thought it may have been a bit of smoke and mirrors, but the more I test Teoma, the more I believe he's done it. But, like I say, the guy is a genius. (And I'm not just saying that because he sent me some very kind words about the topic distillation/Teoma white paper I wrote!)

Having said that, they are quite susceptible to being knocked sideways every now and again as they get their somewhat smaller indexed pummelled with millions of spammy networks.

Coincidentally, as it is, I spotted some very amateur cloaking doing well at Teoma when I was working with a client just last week.

However, they're now in a situation where playing catch-up on market share and brand awareness against Google and the like is going to be very difficult. But, as Danny mentioned, now that they've extended the amount of inventory they have with the purchase of the Infospace properties, they'll be filling up the war chest with a bit more cash for more promotion and expansion.

The timing is just a little too early for this thread, but as fate would have it, I have one of my in-depth "In conversation with..." features, due in the coming weeks with Michael Palka, Director of Product Management at Jeeves. In fact, after Barry's comment about not having close ties with SEO's I think I may drag Michael kicking and screaming in here with me after the interview is published.

Happy Christmas/holidays to all at SEW forums by the way. And I wish you all a happy and prosperous new year!

Cheers!

Mike.

I have never personally used Teoma/Ask Jeves much because it has been so english focused. I work in several languages and need an engine that can return good results in them all - Google does that, Inktomi does that to some degree and we expect MSN to do that too. Teomo/AskJeves dosn't.

It just needed to index more. Nothing else.

There are several issues that comes into play in case they actually did index a lot more and did gain a lot bigger share of the search market.

1) When you increase the number of documents in an index dramatically the algorythms may not work as well as they used to. They may not work at all. I have seen search technology that works fantastic on a limited scale but just can't scale up to the size of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

2) If AskJeves ever gets very popular they will also gain "popularity" with the hard core Black Hats, hackers and spammers alike. The more popular you are the more in target for attacks you get. Can they sistain it? I don't know - only time can (potentially) tell...

On top of this comes "packaging" - Google did the best job in this industry ever when they launched. I will still claim that more than half of Googles succes is due to the "packaging" bundled with the brilliant viral marketing they pulled. Not so much search quality in itself.

An invaluable thread as the titans of SEW weigh in on Jeeves. Nice read guys.
My two cents on Jeeves/Teoma. There appears to be no vision from the top. Battle is cashing in and Berkowitz is not far behind. Insider sales have scared off a good part of the investor community. While institutions are invested the company is hedged by a powerful short lobby. Where they are long Google and Yahoo they are short ASKJ.
The company COULD turn around searcher and investor perspective by marketing the product(s) on a mass scale through TV, radio, print, and local newspapers. No one can argue the loyalties of Iwon, Excite, and MyWay users. Jeeves inherited a very loyal base of users through the ISH acquisition. One would assume that if they could attract more users that more would stay.
Teoma offers more relevant results for my tastes because unlike Google the top serps are not clogged with national brands listings. Often times when I am frustrated with G or Y I find myself at Mamma where I use the refined search results that are supplied default by Teoma.

Plain and simple. There is one way to gain market share - Big media marketing. Until they market nobody talks about Jeeves. I do love that MyWay has a deal with Dell. Being preinstalled on new Dell computers is smart as heck. FunWebProducts distribution of toolbars is very smart also. I mean MyWebSearch is everywhere. Their distribution techiques are great. Their marketing stinks. I used to see iWon commercials 3 or 4 times a day on CBS in the late 90s. User numbers were on fire. When is the last time anybody talked about iWon or any of Ask's properties since the commercials stopped? I rest my case. Its all about marketing. Nobody questions the quality of the product. Unfortunately very few know about the product.

To get a bigger slice of the search queries takes a lot of hard work. And even more for an engine like ASK Jeeves. The Big 3 have grown due to popularity, features from its portal or even being driving traffic from the default homepage on just about every new computer with IE as the browser of choice. HOWEVER, creative concepts like:

http://www.ajkids.com/index.asp?origin=0&meta=1

I believe is very smart, to gain market share by targeting kids => kids grow up and become loyal to their search engines. We see this with grown ups and Google in the biggest proportion. The question really would be.... what is Ask doing to push this strategy off line? Have they installed this as the default search engine in all K-12 schools??? I don't have any clue, but this could be on to something.

Gaining search volume has many strategies, not just one, not just technology. Yes technology can be a BIG issue for our community, but not the only one for THE BIG PICTURE.

Conversations and feedback through forums for search engine representatives and our community is indeed very important, greatly appreciated by both parties and I'm sure it helps grow brand awareness. We are the voice of this industry and as P&G calls it, we are the "trend spreaders" not the "trend starters".

I will be honored to see a representative participate from Ask/Teoma, just as I am with Google and Yahoo!

The Big 3 have grown due to popularity, features from its portal or even being driving traffic from the default homepage on just about every new computer with IE as the browser of choice.

Nacho - MyWay is now the IE default homepage on various new Dell computers. So Jeeves has at least addressed that point.

I believe is very smart, to gain market share by targeting kids => kids grow up and become loyal to their search engines. We see this with grown ups and Google in the biggest proportion. The question really would be.... what is Ask doing to push this strategy off line? Have they installed this as the default search engine in all K-12 schools??? I don't have any clue, but this could be on to something.

I can not help but laugh when I read that. Did you see the thread named Ask Serves Porn to School Kids (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2005). I guess that type of stuff sticks. Of course this was a mistake that was quickly corrected by Ask Jeeves.

The best way for Jeeves to gain market share and proliferate Teoma search technology across the web would be for them to merge into a larger company like AOL or Microsoft but who knows if that will ever happen. Another way is for Jeeves to continue to buy market share like they did with ISH. Unfortunately Jeeves seems way too small to me to keep trying to gain on its own. In my opinion it has to acquire or be acquired.

Jeez, now we have to stop ignoring you guys and actually weigh in for a change. =)

There is some truth and some fiction in the posts above. We're not afraid of admitting our faults, and at the same time wouldn't mind getting more credit for what we are doing today. Let me try to address as much as I can. My in-laws won't mind if I disappear for a while, right? :rolleyes:

The most off-the-mark statements above are that Ask Jeeves has "left Teoma to rot" or that we "lack direction in search," when in fact we are pretty much obsessed with making a great search engine. At the time of the acquisition in late 2001, Teoma only had 7 employees. Since then, our company’s biggest investment in new people has, by far, been in those working directly on the engine, which is now well into triple digits. Apostolos and Tao Yang, the other creator of Teoma, are still leading the way and, yes, they are geniuses.

In terms of the product itself, we’ve invested significantly in building out our search infrastructure (which was nearly non-existent when we bought Teoma) to enable, among other things, index growth, freshness, and internationalization. We’ve also spent a great deal of time and energy honing the core technology that, as Mike notes above, gives Teoma world-class relevance with a differentiated point of view. Our search pick rates on Ask.com continue to rise to all-time highs, across the broad spectrum of user queries, so we're making great progress there.

In terms of innovative features, we've been punching above our weight in being at the forefront of development. Related Topics (the refinement offshoot of Teoma and a leading clustering technology), Smart Answers, Binoculars, Local search, MyJeeves and - yes - Desktop Search, are all recent examples, and we have more fun stuff up our sleeves for 2005. Yes, this includes a step toward the next generation of question answering, since questions account for approximately 20% of our searches today on Ask.com.

Now, to address some more pointed concerns above, let’s start with the number of ads on the page. Danny and I have spoken about this a good deal, and he can vouch for the fact that we understand the points Rusty and others are making. As a public company, there's not a whole lot I can say about this, other than that: a) we're aware of the potential impact to the user experience; and b) we're working on ways to get to the right user experience while balancing revenue. As some of you may recall, we were the first public search company to eliminate banners, towers, and pop-ups on our site (i.e., the first major engine other than Google, which never had them to begin with). We were also the first to eliminate paid inclusion. Give us some time and we'll find the right balance here.

In terms of paid inclusion, we did a lot of talking in this forum and on Webmaster World back when we decided to eliminate the program, so I’ll just refer you to those discussions on that subject.

Re: reaching out to the SEM community, I think we could do more, Rusty's right, though our small size has something to do with it. We’re at every conference we can reasonably attend (even SES Stockholm!), and will continue to do so. JeevesGuy makes appearances when there are questions in the boards. On the other hand, we don’t have JeevesGuy on the boards full-time, and we don’t yet have our own blog for regular communications from our team to the outside world. This is primarily because we usually have our heads down, working like crazy to try to make better products. Any advice you all have on how you'd like to see Ask Jeeves get more involved, we’re all ears.

All in all, we want the same thing you guys seem to want for us, which is quality, differentiation, and growth. I think we’ve been building a solid foundation, which is why we’ve been succeeding the past couple of years despite certain shortcomings. Now we need to take things to the next level, balancing all of our obligations. What I hope you guys take away from this post is that we understand and we’re trying get there as quickly as possible.

Again, any and all advice is sincerely welcomed.

Thanks
Jim

The problem with the millions of other people besides the SEM community here Jim is that nobody talks about you guys. The quality is fine. Everybody talks about Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Its the lack of marketing. Its the regular people in this world you guys should concentrate on. Jeeves is so obsessed with being the best search that they forgot that if nobody talks about you nobody visits your sites. The only person that I know that talks about Jeeves is me. All my friends and co-workers talk about Yahoo and Google, EVEN MY WIFE! When Jeeves biggest fan's wife is talking about Google you know you have a recognition problem.

Any advice you all have on how you'd like to see Ask Jeeves get more involved, we’re all ears.
Hey Jim, thank you so much for spending time to respond.

That's great that you guys want to become "trend starters" with new concepts as you mention for '04 and soon to be in '05, but don't forget your "trend spreaders" = Us, your SEM community.

So you guys participate in just about every SES, that's great! We love you for it! However, the constant communication through the boards and the great SEM blogs (like SERoundtable or Threadwatch.org to name just a couple) give you the best feedback for all your ears. When I first got into this industry one of the first things I learned was: read, read, read. Now after growing up, I know its about: reading, sharing, giving.

If I may add to the great criticisms above, one of my own personal bugbears - any search engine that only allows national TLDs in a search for national-specific websites.

The fact that Ask.co.uk (and some other SE's) only return .uk domains on UK searches is pretty appalling - IMO, you cannot hope to build a strong repuation for any product which makes such awful short-cuts.

The use of the Ask frame over results is something that also seems disrespectful to webmasters, rather than useful to surfers.

What a sign of relief to here from you Jim.

I disagree a little with MUSCLE13 on the statement "Jeeves is so obsessed with being the best search that they forgot that if nobody talks about you nobody visits your sites." People like those who posted in this thread (Mike Grehan, Andrew Goodman, Danny Sullivan, Mikkel, Ammon and so on -- cant name you all, just look up the list) are the trend setters. They all have major reach and we know the when some of those individuals in this thread say something, it trickles through the SEM community like wild fire. Then you find it on blogs, and small content sites. If Danny deems it appropriate he will write on it at SEW. Might propagate its way over to ClickZ and other Jupiter properties. Then CNN might interview Danny on the topic.

But I believe most of the chatter and trend setting comes from deep within side the community and the forums. Going to the SES shows is great! It was great that Tim Mayer and his crew offered me time to interview him about the way Yahoo learns from our community. Google has not done that, but I know they participate in the forums (like Ask does) but even more so in the blogs (which are more mainstream). MSN, it is hard to say for now - all I know is that they have links to SEM blogs on their MSN Search blog (so that makes a statement) AND of course they are at SES and have a rep here.


There is one thing that I think most would agree on. Most of the big names in our industry WANT Ask Jeeves / Teoma to rock this search industry. I know I do, I am pretty sure Mike and Ammon do. We want you to make a statement like no one else. Smart Answers, Binoculars, Local search, MyJeeves and Desktop Search are great. Binoculars is a bit corny but cool. MyJeeves, nice idea for personalization but nothing innovative when compared to the other smaller specialized engines. Desktop, well you have to do that. I must say you guys do an outstanding job with Local.

But Teoma is where you need to focus, IMO. I know you said "Since then, our company’s biggest investment in new people has, by far, been in those working directly on the engine, which is now well into triple digits. Apostolos and Tao Yang, the other creator of Teoma, are still leading the way and, yes, they are geniuses," and that is really wonderful. I think building a buzz around your geniuses (like Google does) would be outstanding. Rutgers has a great name, its a 'cool' university.

I am fishing here, good thing I am not in your position. But I think, and deeply believe its about Teoma.

I've always felt that expecting a search engine to give you the relevant answer you're looking for in one step is expecting too much. That's why I always felt Teoma was on the right lines in showing clusters as a way for the searcher to focus his or her search. None of the other majors has really picked up on that approach, although Google Suggest may have the same objective in mind.

USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is still the way to go, rather than a 'Me Too' approach. So, ASK, I would encourage you to 'Focus, focus, focus' on one of the major things that makes you stand out from the crowd.

But I believe most of the chatter and trend setting comes from deep within side the community and the forums.

Rusty thats great for you SEM guys and people who really get into the net. How about my wife who has no clue what SEM means and just goes on the net to search for ways to spend my money shopping. Or her friends who search for soap opera star gossip, or my friends who are looking for football scores and stats or searching for Madison Square Garden tickets. Joe Public knows nothing about the search industry and people talking about search in community forums or Blogs. Most of my co-workers don't even know what a Blog is! And these are people with post graduate degrees. They know the Yahoo commercials they see on TV and hear on radio and that the Google IPO news is in every newspaper article for a month - So they use Yahoo and Google. Jeeves needs to market to the masses.

You're right, MUSCLE13. Somehow they've got to get people talking about them. Except, who is 'them'.

At the moment, www.ask.com is a Me Too search engine, completely swamped by sponsored listings. www.teoma.com is a really fine search engine, slightly swamped by sponsored listings. Jeeves is that funny butler character that used to symbolize their suggestion that you ask a question.

If we're going to get a 'buzz' viral marketing process going, they need to focus. So I would encourage Ask Jeeves/Teoma to do just that. Simplify the Teoma SERP page somewhat and then have that as the www.ask.com SERP page. ASK is just the best possible domain name and company name they could have. Teoma and Jeeves should be buried. A snappy slogan repeated ad nauseam, such as 'ASK for what you want', should do the trick.

You're right, MUSCLE13. Somehow they've got to get people talking about them. Except, who is 'them'.



I think Jeeves is a lot more than Ask.com and Teoma. MyWay has more users than Ask.com according to Alexa ratings. MyWebSearch does too. iWon had more users than Ask.com for years. They are all Jeeves properties and they all have to be marketed. Technology is great only if people know about it. Can you imagine MyWay is the default homepage on new Dell computers and Jeeves has never even issued a press release on the deal??? I had to search SEC filings to find out about it. I found a UK MyWay portal over a month ago on the net that Jeeves has never even announced. Where is the marketing? My opinion - They ignore marketing to their own disadvantage.

Rusty thats great for you SEM guys and people who really get into the net...

Maybe you did not get my point. It trickles down. Of course your Mom doesn't know what SEM is. But she does know what CNN is.

Maybe you did not get my point. It trickles down. Of course your Mom doesn't know what SEM is. But she does know what CNN is.

Rusty - I have nothing against the buzz you guys create. In these times its no where near as important as a TV commercial campaign. Google came out at a time where they were head and shoulders above any search engine out there technologically and you SEM guys brought their buzz to the computer world. They beat all the big boys because they were that much better. In today's world there is not that much of a difference in quality between Google Yahoo Microsoft and Jeeves. Mass market branding is the only way for Jeeves to go. Unless they merge with somebody else.

If you guys can get them on CNN stories every week I salute you. TV and radio commercials are a much more realistic option I think.

MUSCLE13, I'm not sure what they do currently gives any good clues on what they should be doing. By common consent, we all seem to be agreeing that the current approach doesn't work.

Strategy is tough. It involves deciding what you're not going to do. I believe they should pour all their passion and energy into ASK. ASK is a great asset and a much better company brand name, than any of Google, Yahoo! (yes, you've got to include the '!') or MSN Search. So 'Focus, focus, focus' would suggest running with ASK.

What exactly is ASK. Well that's up to Ask Jeeves/Teoma to decide. I think the Teoma content has the makings of being a great USP. So I would suggest putting the ASK shell around the Teoma core.

It is very hard to get any sort of conversation going in an Ask SEO forum. Most new webmasters' loose interest in Ask as soon as you tell them there is no free submission URL.

Let's forget SEO's for a minute, the rank and file webmaster with one website still puts a lot of faith into URL submission and once their web pages start appearing they feel a certain amount of gratitude: they submit, they come back to see if they are included, and they continue to to come back to check rankings. And then they talk and/or brag about those rankings with their friends.

By not having a free URL submit form Ask is loosing out on a lot of good will and word of mouth they could be building with mom and pop webmasters and their friends. Right now you are taking yourself off the webmaster radar even before you start.

Remember it's human nature to ask "what have you done for me lately?", Yahoo and Google's free submit form gives people that emotional investment in the engine and that emotion plays a much larger role in motivation than most will admit.

To many Sponsored ads above the fold on too many searches. This is the single biggest thing that keeps me from recommending Ask to other people, when everything above the fold is an ad I consider it a critical problem.

BWelford - Ask may be their flagship site but from everything I hear on their quarterly earnings calls they are going with a multi-brand approach.

Personally, I agree with that approach but not without heavy marketing support behind the various brands.

You're quite right, MUSCLE13. I note the following from the Ask Jeeves Inc. November quarterly statement

We provide computer users with information search and retrieval services, free of charge, across a diverse portfolio of branded Web sites and desktop applications. We generate revenue primarily by displaying advertisements on our Web sites and by selling ads for display on third-party sites in the AJinteractive advertising network. Our branded Web sites include seven sites dedicated to search and three broader-purpose, content-rich Web sites (known generally as portals). We seek to attract Web traffic to our branded sites by creating distinctive online experiences that users will find intuitive and satisfying. On our Ask Jeeves brand sites (Ask.com in the U.S.; Ask.co.uk in the U.K. and Ask.jp, our Ask Jeeves Japan joint venture) users submit search queries and our proprietary algorithmic search engine, Teoma, delivers a results list of Web pages likely to contain relevant and authoritative answers. Our Smart Search function improves the online experience by delivering the information the user is seeking right on the results page, in response to popular query topics. Our advertising products include keyword-targeted ads, which are popular among advertisers because they appear on search results pages in response to related words in the user’s query. Our proprietary technologies include Teoma, natural language processing software, portal technology and ad-serving processes.

Our main goal is to increase our Web traffic by attracting more users to our sites and portals and getting them to use our search services more frequently. We are pursuing this goal using a multi-brand strategy and by making our search services accessible in several different ways.

It's a typical product-driven company strategy. You can get away with that if you're Microsoft. For most others, it's best to go with a customer-centric approach. Multi-brand and multi-niche is, IMHO, a recipe for disaster. In general, you should choose a Niche and be the best supplier to that Niche.

For example, look at the much simpler and focused approach set out in the Google November quarterly statement.

We are a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information. Our innovations in web search and advertising have made our web site a top Internet destination and our brand one of the most recognized in the world. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We serve three primary constituencies:

• Users. We provide users with products and services that enable people to more quickly and easily find, create and organize information that is useful to them.

• Advertisers. We provide advertisers our Google AdWords program, an auction-based advertising program that enables them to deliver relevant ads targeted to search results or web content. Our AdWords program provides advertisers with a cost-effective way to deliver ads to customers across Google sites and through the Google Network under our AdSense program.

• Web sites. We provide members of our Google Network our Google AdSense program, which allows these members to deliver AdWords ads that are relevant to the search results or content on their web sites. We share most of the fees these ads generate with our Google Network members—creating an important revenue stream for them.

I rest my case.

I appreciate Jim Lanzone's reply - particularly interesting to hear about the headcount in the search dept.

That's obviously a necessary but not sufficient condition for gaining market share.

I just wanted to clarify where I'm coming from. My own takes on these matters are very much market-driven. Although I like to peer into the crystal ball from time to time (which is why I need to see that a search technology is not only *good* but also *compelling* and *captivating*), in the consulting biz, probably 85% of what I concern myself with is the most profitable placement of paid listings on the web (i.e. it's the advertising business basically).

When it comes to Ask.com in particular, then, my clients' engagement begins and ends with Google AdWords. From what we can see Ask is one of the best Google partners.

As for some of the other properties, they're a mixed bag when it comes to traffic quality.

Seeing things through that lens very much means having a fairly strict notion of what comes on the old radar screen, in spite of the degree of respect one might have for the people involved at various companies.

I have always been of the mind that what really got people fired up about Ask was that it might be a new type of technology. Nobody thought it was cool because it could solve the run-time doo-hickey in the Kleinberg whizbang as an able cousin to Google (ahem, Mike).

Anyway, the market will continue to speak, and I will continue to listen.

Search volume is not just about the U.S., U.K. or kids, it's about the entire online world population and the www. What about all of the Spanish searches done with the 65 million online Hispanics from the U.S. down to the lowest regions in Argentina and Chile, then add the extra 25 million for Brazil to complete Latin America . . . and with statistics lagging behind (like always), round it off to 100 million.

We know that Google gets it, Yahoo! gets it, MSN knows it . . . Does ASK / TEOMA???? You get more market share if you only look at the entire picture of the Internet's population.

Search volume is not just about the U.S., U.K. or kids, it's about the entire online world population and the www. What about all of the Spanish searches done

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3532

Thank you for pointing it out MUSCLE13. So add another 17 million online users for Spain on top of the 100 million for Hispanics and Latin America.

Can one person do it all to gain this ambitious market share?

They have mentioned at many investor conferences they are expanding into Europe and Japan in 2005. Although how they plan to grow here and internationally with their lack of marketing is beyond me.

Muscle, you want TV & Radio?

"If you build a better mouse-trap, the world will beat a path to your door."

NOT

Muscle, you want TV & Radio?

Yep, In 1999 when I was following CBS stock, CBS made a deal with a new portal called iWon. I saw iWon commercials on CBS all the time. I heard iWon commercials on Howard Stern almost everyday. iWon became a top 10 site in daily internet users in less than a year.

Now look at Jeeves. Technology is great only if people know about it.

Yep, In 1999 when I was following CBS stock, CBS made a deal with a new portal called iWon. I saw iWon commercials on CBS all the time. I heard iWon commercials on Howard Stern almost everyday. iWon became a top 10 site in daily internet users in less than a year.

Now look at Jeeves. Technology is great only if people know about it.

TV is expensive. I do not know if they have a budget to compete with Google or Yahoo in terms of offline TV/Radio spend. :)

TV is expensive. I do not know if they have a budget to compete with Google or Yahoo in terms of offline TV/Radio spend. :)

Well then thats a huge problem. They have to be innovative. iWon didn't spend a dime for those CBS TV and radio ads. I think it was worth about $80 mill if I am correct. They gave a stock equity stake to CBS in return for the advertising.

By the way Barry I think search advertising is the most targeted advertising that ever existed and will grow immensely. I love your industry. But for mass market branding (which is what Jeeves needs) I will take TV or radio any day of the week.

Personally at this point in time I would change the title of this thread to "The Little Engine that Couldn't." I love Jeeves but I am so pessimistic about their marketing strategy or lack there of.

Ok, let's get this thread going again. Muscle wants TV and Radio.

What do others feel will make a difference?

Many said focusing on Teoma, some said being creative, some said new products. Any body have more to add?

Strategy is tough. It involves deciding what you're not going to do. I believe they should pour all their passion and energy into ASK. ASK is a great asset and a much better company brand name, than any of Google, Yahoo! (yes, you've got to include the '!') or MSN Search. So 'Focus, focus, focus' would suggest running with ASK.

What exactly is ASK. Well that's up to Ask Jeeves/Teoma to decide. I think the Teoma content has the makings of being a great USP. So I would suggest putting the ASK shell around the Teoma core.

I agree with this post whole-heartedly. IMO, Ask has two things going for it that make it distinct from the big 3 SEs and give it the potential to gain market share.

First, the natural language queries make it unique among SEs and potentially more appealing to less technical searchers who may not understand how to pick the right keywords to search for what they want in other engines. Additionally, because the questions people type into Ask are longer and more specific than keyword queries entered into other SEs it gives Ask the potential to provide vastly superior relevence. IMO, Ask should pour tons of research into developing the AI necessary take advantage of this and blow away the other SEs on relevence. This has huge potential for mobile devices, too as I'm sure people would love to just speak a question into a device to get highly relevent search results.

The second thing Ask has going for it is its brand. Ask is the best name of any SE out there and the butler is a very recognizable and personable "mascot," that has a lot of potential appeal to the average internet user. Google rose to prominence as the techno-geek's search engine. Yahoo & MSN seem to be trying to compete with Google by becoming more like Google, which leaves the door open for Ask to market itself as the SE for the common person. Ask should market itself through the mass media as a friendly SE where regular people can get answers to regular questions.

I agree ask is a great name for a search engine and could be used to really brand ask.com.
The fact that Google, Yahoo and MSN have strong positions is not something that should deter anyone. Google was an unknown 5 years ago.

Ok, let's get this thread going again. Muscle wants TV and Radio.

What do others feel will make a difference?

Many said focusing on Teoma, some said being creative, some said new products. Any body have more to add?
We've had TV ads for Ask here in the UK. It helps push for brand recognition, but what are the actual strategic aims of Ask as a company?

I guess what Ask could do is decide what their actual USP is. If it is "strong relevant search techology", then the corresponding question has to be why this is being effectively pushed aside for sponsored advertising within the organic results.

Ok, let's get this thread going again. Muscle wants TV and Radio.

What do others feel will make a difference?

Many said focusing on Teoma, some said being creative, some said new products. Any body have more to add?

Absolutely TV and radio and before Google rolls out their mass marketing campaign. Yahoo with their somewhat obnoxious yodeler installed the brand into everyones brain years ago and they continue today. The MSN butterfly thing shows that not all mass marketing works, I still haven't a clue what it means or does. Ask! is obvious and brilliant and Jeeves is already a recognized brand. My kids by default always say "let's ask Jeeves" when a question needs an answer.
I think the company must market each segment. The other properties appeal to different sorts.
Liken it to the beer market. Take Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser is the flagship product and they have an immense following but they also market "O'Douls" and "Natural Light" as well as over a dozen other beers that each have their own following. You could argue that light beer brands taste the same as one another so the same could be said about SEs.
In America it is all about marketing. Google has won the buzz on all fronts. Yahoo is steady. The obvious solution for ASK is to ramp up some serious buzz of their own.
They have the money, last check they were sitting on almost 90 million in cash!
I'm thirsty now.

The original post had a snippet of the article that announced AJ cancelling their lease in Oakland. Once the money started coming in they retook the lease and have been moving in since mid-November. Their site now lists Oakland as their headquarters, and there are certainly a bunch more techno-dweebs at some of my favorite lunch restaurants.

I think up until recently a lot of their growth prospects were hampered by by dismal moods due to lack of money. Once the money started coming in they had all the lease and moving problems to contend with (not to mention the fact that their old office space was tiny).

Now that they have great office space and a full back account, I'd expect them to be far more mentally able to persue business startegies.

Jeez, now we have to stop ignoring you guys and actually weigh in for a change. =)
It is a great pleasure to see you doing so, Jim (if I may be so bold as to call you Jim?), and especially so with no use of a pseudonym, and the pride to use your own name and position so openly.

The most off-the-mark statements above are that Ask Jeeves has "left Teoma to rot" or that we "lack direction in search," when in fact we are pretty much obsessed with making a great search engine.
I do hope that my own statements were not considered part of that. I believe that Ask are now placing a strong and respectable emphasis on search. However, I do believe that it took a while to come to this point.

Shall we agree that securing the financial stability of Ask was of greater necessity at that time, at least in the shorter term, than was the longer term goals for which Teoma was acquired?

That's not a criticism of Ask, just a sad necessity indicative of the way investors sometimes desire a quick victory far more than a winning long-term strategy. We're all from the real-world here, after all.

I still saw that as a huge waste, and the biggest lost-opportunity in the history of search engines.

It is good to see that you are on the right road now, and marching forthrightly along it, but just think what time was lost in 2001, 2002 and 2003 when you could, with just a little more commited investment, probably have now been the #1 search engine. Teoma had that potential, despite its limitations. It still has, but the world did not stand still, and Yahoo moved ahead far further and more swiftly than poor Teoma was allowed to... then at least.

JeevesGuy makes appearances when there are questions in the boards.
I might be alone in this preferrence, Jim, but as I alluded at the start of this post, I would far rather see one occassional post from 'Jim Lanzone' than a hundred from some 'JeevesGuy'. The personal approach, with attribution, just counts for so much more. Sure, I too have a 'handle' or 'nick', but I attribute my name to each post too. I don't know why, but I do find that far better than a generic or anonymous username where trust and honesty are to be sought.

As for suggestions, well, we have one user asking for TV and Radio advertising, who is perhaps missing the campaigns Ask have been running, (e.g. the £2million ad campaign by TBWA\London designed to back and bolster the online advertising (featuring the new-look more dynamic Jeeves character) by Profero this Winter in the UK).

That's the traditional advertising asked for, and its previous success in the UK had Ask rated top, right alongside Google, in a survey of net-users back in 2001. But without the user-experience and search satisfaction being as simple to grasp and enjoy as Google, it doesn't last. The fact is that the interface of AJ itself is cluttered, difficult, and somewhat confusing.

Suggestion #1 therefore from me is to work on usability. Hard.

For paid listings, attempt to promote quality over quantity. My second suggestion is therefore to reduce the number of paid-listings partners, and stick to the one that offers the best possible results, even if not the best price per click.

Finally, if you are to keep 'Jeeves' as a character, make him work harder. Perhaps have Jeeves present personal or localised options at the side of a regular search. Have Jeeves act as a helper more, and thus brand the 'service' aspect better.

We don't want a butler.

But virtual assistants are in hot demand.

Well then thats a huge problem. They have to be innovative. iWon didn't spend a dime for those CBS TV and radio ads. I think it was worth about $80 mill if I am correct. They gave a stock equity stake to CBS in return for the advertising.

By the way Barry I think search advertising is the most targeted advertising that ever existed and will grow immensely. I love your industry. But for mass market branding (which is what Jeeves needs) I will take TV or radio any day of the week.
So iWon pumped up its user base by spending heavily on ads, and moreover, that user base was only generating page views because iWon was GIVING AWAY MONEY!

This might be one type of company, but it is not a search company. Either it's a hype dot com strategy or a Publisher's Clearing House type of model.

Neither interest me much, but to each his own.

This might be one type of company, but it is not a search company.

The CEO of Jeeves said at the last earnings call - People who visit iWon are so loyal that they search double or triple the amount of times per month than the users of Ask.com do. Maybe if you guys would not spend so much time looking down your noses at anything besides technology you would know the search facts. Thats why I always implore Jeeves on these boards to market to the masses.

>People who visit iWon are so loyal that they search double or triple the amount of times per month than the users of Ask.com do.

Mr MUSCLE13, it may have escaped your notice but a search gets 10 entries at iwon, they put it bright red next to the search box.

IMPO iwon is a POS of no interest nor value to the professional Internet marketer. Ask risks tarnishing their brand by being associated with such a bad neighborhood.

>IMPO iwon is a POS of no interest nor value to the professional Internet marketer. Ask risks tarnishing their brand by being associated with such a bad neighborhood.

This is exactly the problem I see. The professional internet marketer. That is who Jeeves is trying to please by perfecting their search. Pleasing you SEM guys is not where Jeeves should be focusing their effort. You guys do not represent the average internet users. They already have great search. They should be heavily marketing their brands to the general public. Sparking general public interest and increasing traffic forces advertisers to take notice. Advertising goes where the traffic is.

It is very nice to have the opinion of an individual outside of the SEM community. I respect your opinion, as I hope others do, and as I hope you respect ours.

Thank you for sharing the thoughts of an average searcher on this topic.

Barry - I always respect your opinion. You go out of your way to be open minded. Unfortunately most people on internet boards turn it into flame sessions. I tend to disagree with popular opinions. I am not into group think. Thus my disagreement is taken as an insult by the message boards, and my ideas are discounted. Such is life on internet forums. :)

>IMPO iwon is a POS of no interest nor value to the professional Internet marketer. Ask risks tarnishing their brand by being associated with such a bad neighborhood.

Wow, what does that say about the professional agencies and their clients currently advertising on the Iwon portal?
According to Alexa Iwon is increasing traffic in an ever more competitive arena. How could it be said that a top 300 internet property with a loyal following could be a detriment to the reputation of the parent? True Iwon attracts the less sophisticated internet user but the same could be said of shoppers at WalMart. ASK obviously sees the value in catering to a variety of users.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=iwon.com (http://)

The results seem to be getting worse and worse - entire SERPS full of duplicate sites serving viruses, really odd results that have little to do with the search criteria, etc.

I would second this.... When Teoma was new, I used it as a backup for Google, and on many searches the pages I found seemed pretty good. The results I've seen over the past year and a half have been increasingly stale.

Teoma has been consistently the last engine to deep crawl sites or to update 301 redirects, and it keeps old pages around for a long time after they've disappeared or been redirected.

I've also noted from the beginning that Teoma's algo can be fooled by links from pages containing a lot of outbound links. I don't know how the algo would do against spam targeted at it, because thus far it's probably not been worth anybody's effort to give that a serious shot.

Some of the current serps for commercial searches I monitor are completely puzzling. The sites returned are definitely not what I'd call good quality sites, by any stretch of the imagination. And the index is small.

I'd like AJ/Teoma to succeed, but it's going to take more than advertising... and let's remember that Teoma has had a huge amount of hype in the past. Currently, even WiseNut gives much fresher and deeper results.

As for Ask... for me, at any rate, framing pages returned is unforgiveable, even with the remove link.

I don't get a lot of Ask visitors but I do get some. But good God at the amount of pages it is spidering! It's soaking up way more than even Google.

Robert Charlton
As for Ask... for me, at any rate, framing pages returned is unforgiveable, even with the remove link.
Absolutely unforgiveable, and incredibly foolish. And I'm speaking from the perspective of someone whose market is Ask-friendly. I've got sites that get daily traffic from Ask - it's the demographic and I'm coming to know it better and better as time goes by.

Here's what it looks like to a webmaster who caters primarily to the type of people who are liable to use Ask (spoken from experience). We look at logs and stats to see search terms and patterns of consumer demand. When our visitors seem to be looking for certain product types, we can focus on those to give users more of what they want. If they find what they want at an engine, they'll go back and use it again.

Ask frames the pages and obscures the very information that would help us better serve needs of searchers. That hurts the users and ultimately Ask because the ladies just go off to MSN to search.

It doesn't hurt us much at all , our shoppers will just find us by searching someplace else. Those women who found the motion activated singing moose door wreath they *had* to have by searching at MSN this holiday season (no, I'm not kidding, he was hot with that crowd) - they'll be going back to MSN for next years holiday shopping. And I know what types of products they're looking for - dozens of them - and will be better prepared to serve their needs, thanks to server stats but no thanks to Ask. If that moose is still available he will have a page of his very own. ;)

The only sites I've ever seen any Ask traffic at all were ones that are the type that appeal to the womens market - average housewife, family goods & consumer goods. If there's any evidence otherwise, I've never seen it. Framed results - ultimately user unfriendly, and ultimately consumer unfriendly; and if it stays unfriendly it'll someday come back to bite hard. We webmasters have to know our visitors and put out what appeals to them, and so do search engines.

that a top 300 internet property with a loyal following
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=iwon.com (http://)

Webvistor - At one time iWon was not just a top 300. It was the 8th most visited site on the net -

http://www1.iwon.com/home/companyinfo/press/press_partner_article_overview/0,4926,126|press_article,00.html

That was in the year 2000 when CBS was doing all that marketing! Its clear to me that marketing is Jeeve's only option to grow. Unless they merge with another company.

I'd like to know if the enterprise search application that Ask announced in mid-2002 would have helped their overall market perception and business viability today. In mid-2003, I believe they sold the technology and current clients to Kanisa. I noticed a few weeks ago that Yahoo and Verity announced a partnership to integrate enterprise search with web search.

Mid-2002
"What Ask Jeeves has done is flip the way they look at the universe. Instead of looking outward from the enterprise they are looking inward now." said Harley Manning research director at Forrester on the announcement

Mid-2003
"For some time now, we have said we have two very different businesses," said Skip Battle, Ask Jeeves' chief executive. "The enterprise software market is in a deep freeze. Web properties is where we need to put our focus."

Now we have the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search (AJDS) application and the possibility that the tool could be integrated with MyJeeves in the future. The new Verity® enterprise web search software promises to enable enterprise users to access internal and web content with a single query.

So what is Ask's enterprise search strategy now?

I normally go straight to Teoma to search/rankcheck, so last night I went to Ask and did a few searches instead.

Those frames have to go. Period. At the very minimum, they should be opt-in (ie "Launch this result in a frame") but NEVER opt-out.

Not to mention I see no "remove frame" link anywhere on the frame. That's where it should be - not in the settings or elsewhere. It's like a full screen flash intro to a website - the <skip intro> should be right there, and it should not be the default action of the site. Actually, it's very much like it in terms of annoyance factor. Some people think they are very cool - let them opt-IN.

Frames are very close to universally loathed. I'm not very fond of About for the same reason.

Another reason I hate this?

Tell me how someone who is not technically savvy and is therefore using that friendly butler thingy will come back to the wonderful website they found. Well, they would presumably to what they do everywhere else - save it to favorites.

But Wait! they are not saving the website - they are saving an ask Jeeves search! Yes, the search includes the domain, but what URL will they tell their friends about? Why, it's whatever is in the address bar, of course! You know, something really easy like:

http://web.ask.com/redir?bpg=http%3a%2f%2fweb.ask.com%
2fweb%3fq%3dmcanerin%26o%3d0%26page%3d1&q=mcanerin&u=http%3a%
2f%2ftm.wc.ask.com%2fr%3ft%3dan%26s%3da%26uid%
d0BCFB2D5DA35FF014%26sid%3d1FD133E5648858D14%26qid %
3d09DAAB4337C7784B98313B97EA5F76F8%26io%3d0%26sv%3 dz6f5372f1%
6o%3d0%26ask%3dmcanerin%26uip%3d449048d2%26en%3dte %26eo%3d-
00%26pt%3dWebsite%2bPromotion%2b%257c%2bInternet%2 bMarketing%2b-
2bMcAnerin%2bNetworks%2bInc.%26ac%3d24%26qs%3d16%2 6pg%3d1%
6ep%3d1%26te_par%3d108%26te_id%3d%26u%3dhttp%3a%2f %
fwww.mcanerin.com%2f&s=a&bu=http%3a%2f%2fwww.mcanerin.com%
f&qte=0&o=0&abs=McAnerin+Networks+Inc.+Ian+McAnerin+was+a+pane list+a
+Search+Engine+Strategies+(SES)+in+Toronto%
2c+2004.+&tit=Website+Promotion+%7c+Internet+Marketing+-
+McAnerin+Networks+Inc.&bin=0ba5226e16d3a927a51a15e38f2d467a%26s%
3d2323650756&cat=wp&purl=http%3a%2f%2ftm.wc.ask.com%2fi%2fb.html%
3ft%3dan%26s%3da%26uid%3d0BCFB2D5DA35FF014%26sid%
3d1FD133E5648858D14%26qid%3d09DAAB4337C7784B98313B 97EA5F76F8%
26io%3d%26sv%3dz6f5372f1%26o%3d0%26ask%3dmcanerin% 26uip%
3d449048d2%26en%3dbm%26eo%3d-100%26pt%3d%26ac%3d24%26qs%
3d16%26pg%3d1%26u%3dhttp%3a%2f%2fmyjeeves.ask.com% 2faction%
2fsnip&Complete=1

Which of course is no problem to read over a phone :rolleyes: Much more user friendly than www-dot-mcanerin-dot-com...

Oh, that's right - I can used the "saved" function instead.

No.

Using the saved function IN ADDITION would be cool. I would even keep track and maybe consider using a visitors saved items to help decide what they were looking for. But not as a replacement for favorites, or send to desktop, or send URL via email or all that stuff.

That's just wrong.

Further, if they ever try to back up their links or favorites to CD/DVD, I suspect this shortcut would truncated to the point of usless (it's way too long). Preventing people from backing up their data is a bad thing. Bad.

So far the constructive feedback is:

1. Increase the index
2. Get rid of the dupes and cheesy cloaking (ie spend some time spam fighting)
3. Kill the frames or find something else that's better. At the very least let me save the damn site I found in my favorites directly!
4. I'd like anti spam options like view cache or view in text only mode.

Good things:

1. I like the results sometimes. A lot. It's not the algo I'm upset with. It's the garbage in, garbage out issue. If you allow garbage to get indexed, even the best algo around will spit out garbage as a result, IMO.

2. I like MyJeeves and being able to save results is a very cool feature - one thing: many people will research a topic at a specific time, and I'd like to be able to create a folder and set it as default ahead of time, then all my saves would go right into it. This is easier than moving them later. Being able to export them as a table or spreadsheet would be very good. A "bibliography mode" for printing would also be great. Think researcher.

3. I REALLY like the "Check My Spelling" option in AJKids - why not make it an option for the main one - sometimes I want to misspell something (or use real english instead of 'murcan ;) ) It would also be really good if there were more than one proper spelling (optimization vs optimisation) that both were shown, maybe with a number of results beside each one and a notation of US vs UK, or what ever. Yes, I'm dreaming - but it really would be helpful.

I could go on all day - I really love/hate ask, and the fact that I and others have strong feelings about this wonderful little engine means that we want it to work. When no one responds and there is no feedback, then no one cares - that's a far worse thing, IMO...

Ian

mcanerin
I normally go straight to Teoma to search/rankcheck, so last night I went to Ask and did a few searches instead.
Yes you do Ian, but you are not a woman. As of a few years ago, the figures I saw were that women constituted around 58% of the searching/spending internet population.

The womens market has yet to be properly or efficiently recognized and targeted. The man who is at his job looking for tech stuff or golf clubs won't necessarily search the same way or at the same places as his sweet little wife who is at home or on her job shopping with the family credit card out, looking to spend and wanting to buy him a golf gift for Fathers Day.

I'm not much of a business woman, nor do I particularly like "business" as such, but it still makes sense to me that it makes more sense that a company of any type, rather than try to compete with the leading-edge company that already has a different type of appeal to a different type of audience, could rather spend resources on identifying what their historical strong points are and planning for future on taking advantage of their proven strong points as far as market share is concerned.

IMHO, Ask needs to take steps to properly identify their most targetable market share in terms of the searching population, and gear any possible future promotion to grow based on existing foundations that at least have some element of solidity and track record that can be substantiated with at least some degree of accuracy.

The interface needs modifying, to say the least. Beyond that, a loyal and growing user base needs to be built based on structuring the scope and realistic target of their appeal.

Great post by Marcia. Instead of looking at every little site issue go after the big issue. Market to your user base!

The average internet user can't tell the difference between the quality of search results from Google Yahoo or Jeeves. Wall Street Journal ran a story on that a few months ago showing the results of a blind study. Quality is similar.

But you SEM guys ask everyday people outside the industry whether they know about Google and Yahoo and they will say of course. Who hasn't heard about them. Then ask them whether they have heard of Ask Jeeves, iWon, MyWay or MyWebSearch and most will say oh I think those were internet companies that existed years ago (if they recognize any of the names at all). Ask Jeeves sites have an absolutely huge branding problem.

Hey did any of you guys see John Battelle (SearchBlog) on 60 Minutes tonight talking about search and Google? In my opinion he came across as smarter than any of the Google guys interviewed. That guy knows his stuff!

>Then ask them whether they have heard of Ask Jeeves

Brand Awareness - Ask Jeeves has the 2nd highest pure search brand awareness in the U.S

http://sp.ask.com/docs/ad/p1.html

I saw Google on 60 minutes (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/30/60minutes/main664063.shtml) last night and one thing that stood out, related to this thread is that they have never done a TV commercial ever!

And I'll quote:
To this day, Google has still never run a TV commercial. Their popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun.

Interesting to note...

I think one of the great features of a successful web page is that it forces you to focus. You've got to grab and hold attention in a few seconds. That's a prerequisite for effective functioning on the Internet. If you do it well enough, then people will blog about it to their communities. So any Internet-based business should figure out how to use this same medium to hook potential prospects.

There is no paradox in Google never having used TV commercials. The only paradox is that any Internet-based business should have such poor Internet marketing that it needs to consider using TV.

There is one way to gain market share - Big media marketing
Hasn't worked for the others. As noted, Google didn't need it. See no reason why this is going to help Ask Jeeves.

Yep, In 1999 when I was following CBS stock, CBS made a deal with a new portal called iWon. I saw iWon commercials on CBS all the time. I heard iWon commercials on Howard Stern almost everyday. iWon became a top 10 site in daily internet users in less than a year.
Sure did help for the short term -- not in the long term. If it was in the long-term, then Ask wouldn't own iWon right now :)

It also helped that iWon wasn't paying millions for these ads. That was part of the deal, if I recall, because CBS had an ownership stake. Someone mentioned the Ask UK ads in the UK. Helped there because I think Carlton had a stake in the joint-venture. Ads are cheap, when a television station wants to make them that way.

Northern Light spent millions on advertising. Didn't boost them at all but sure did cost a lot of money.

Yahoo, Lycos, Excite and the traditionals all spent big on TV in the past. Didn't help in the long-run. In particular, Yahoo kept its strength in my view primarily from the word-of-mouth it started out with.

Google hasn't run ads? Yeah, not aimed at consumers. Potential advertisers are heavily marketed to, of course. But AltaVista was the same thing, no big ad campaigns, but good word-of-mouth drove users.

Ask is and has done marketing. Print campaign (http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/10789_2193461)in 2003, the Butler back (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041125-131227) in the Thanksgiving parade this year to name just some. They've been at conferences even aside from SEM related shows back in 2000, have run outdoor campaigns and done other things.

(FYI, anyone interested in this type of activity by Ask or other search engines should check out the Revenues: Promotion (http://searchenginewatch.com/_subscribers/topics/article.phpr/?id=null&topic=revenues_promotions) category of SEW that's available to our paid members. It's a guide to stories on the subject back to 1997)

Who hasn't heard about them. Then ask them whether they have heard of Ask Jeeves, iWon, MyWay or MyWebSearch and most will say oh I think those were internet companies that existed years ago (if they recognize any of the names at all). Ask Jeeves sites have an absolutely huge branding problem.

Yes, and I think this will be the big challenge in 2005. No major search engine has been successful promoting multiple brands. No one. They all die in favor of one. Excite didn't keep Webcrawler or Magellan going. Yahoo's letting AllTheWeb and AltaVista wither. Lycos loved, neglected, loved, then neglected again HotBot. I think Ask has a big challenge in keeping all these brands going. But it also might not have to. When it purchased ISH, it grabbed sites that may have decreased to some natural word-of-mouth level. In other words, the share it bought may not decline because it already had declined to some natural level. That means it may be able to put efforts just in to the Ask brand in hopes of getting a percentage or two. And that's the other thing. Ask is very unlikely to get a huge share like Google, Yahoo or MSN. But a percentage or two to them is a big deal in revenues.

First, the natural language queries make it unique among SEs
This was a myth back when Ask first launched and remains so today. Do your natural language queries in any search engine. They'll process just like Ask does -- which means, they'll do nothing special.

Its clear to me that marketing is Jeeve's only option to grow. Unless they merge with another company.
Microsoft should have bought them rather than the built it yourself idea. Would have saved them over a year of development time. And I still wouldn't rule this out. AOL, of course, remains another possibility.

I
I have always been of the mind that what really got people fired up about Ask was that it might be a new type of technology. Nobody thought it was cool because it could solve the run-time doo-hickey in the Kleinberg whizbang as an able cousin to Google (ahem, Mike).


Hehe! The doohickey on the whizbang impressed the wotsit out of me Andrew.

But, if you're suggesting maybe I should get out more often... :)

Google hasn't run ads? Yeah, not aimed at consumers.

Google is a fairly prominent underwriter of public radio in the San Francisco Bay Area, and generally their blurb mentions that they're looking for software engineers.

I think Google's identity is such that overtly commercial advertising might have a negative effect. They were built on word-of-mouth by users, who still see them as dedicated to quality, and commercials might actually cloud that perception.

No major search engine has been successful promoting multiple brands. No one.

It's the dupe engine penalty. ;)


...the natural language queries make it unique among SEs

The natural language queries of the original Ask Jeeves were different from what they're doing now. Ask Jeeves originally was more of a directory than a search engine, and the responses to natural language queries were pre-scripted answers to anticipated questions corresponding to information contained in the AJ database.

natural language queries were pre-scripted answers to anticipated questions corresponding to information contained in the AJ database.

Yes, exactly. Compared to todays level on natural human language engineering, as done by the best in that business, AJs early attempts was just an advanced web-based "call-card" :)

I saw Google on 60 minutes (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/30/60minutes/main664063.shtml) last night and one thing that stood out, related to this thread is that they have never done a TV commercial ever!

And I'll quote: Quote:
To this day, Google has still never run a TV commercial. Their popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun.



Interesting to note...

Barry I think you Danny and possibly even Jeeves itself have completely missed the point. Google was head and shoulders above the rest of the search industry in terms of quality when they hit the internet and grew by leaps and bounds. Yahoo and MSN were barely concentrating on search years ago. It was a loss leader. The world is not that way anymore. Jeeves is not head and shoulders above the other players that they can rely on word of mouth the way Google did. Indeed the 4 players (Google, Yahoo, Jeeves and MSN) are now pretty much equal in search quality according to countless studies. Its all going to come down to marketing and branding. Nobody is going to run away from the field on quality the way Google did a few years ago.






As noted, Google didn't need it. See no reason why this is going to help Ask Jeeves.

Danny see my comment to Barry above






Sure did help for the short term -- not in the long term. If it was in the long-term, then Ask wouldn't own iWon right now

Correct. CBS stopped the ads in 2001. iWon's top 10 status started its fall. Did Yahoo ever stop advertising? Marketing is not a one year deal. All I ever hear on my radio are those Yahoo commercials constantly. Yahoo advertised in the 90s and they continue to market heavily today. Where is Jeeves marketing?





No major search engine has been successful promoting multiple brands. No one. They all die in favor of one. Excite didn't keep Webcrawler or Magellan going. Yahoo's letting AllTheWeb and AltaVista wither. Lycos loved, neglected, loved, then neglected again HotBot. I think Ask has a big challenge in keeping all these brands going. But it also might not have to. When it purchased ISH, it grabbed sites that may have decreased to some natural word-of-mouth level. In other words, the share it bought may not decline because it already had declined to some natural level. That means it may be able to put efforts just in to the Ask brand in hopes of getting a percentage or two. And that's the other thing. Ask is very unlikely to get a huge share like Google, Yahoo or MSN. But a percentage or two to them is a big deal in revenues.

Well since the ISH properties were doing more queries per quarter than the Jeeves properties at the time of the merger in 04 according to the merger press release and earnings calls Jeeves better concentrate on all its properties or they will lose share!

The natural language queries of the original Ask Jeeves were different from what they're doing now. Ask Jeeves originally was more of a directory than a search engine, and the responses to natural language queries were pre-scripted answers to anticipated questions corresponding to information contained in the AJ database.
Yep, but even then, it wasn't a natural language thing that was involved.

Here's my perspective. AJ put itself out orginally as a "natural language" search engine. Enter your query as a full sentence, go ahead, we'll have an answer!

Behind the scenes, they did have some good tools to map some queries to another. Bill Clinton might be mapped to US President and so on. This wasn't really natural language processing, nor was it the heart to Ask's original popularity.

As you point out, the key thing in them actually getting good answers was having a team of editors that preselected the right answers for the most popular questions. That, of course, is why Yahoo was also popular. A query at Yahoo didn't bring back millions of results but instead a few 1,000 from a human compiled database. But Yahoo never encouraged people to enter queries as a sentence (even though they could), so it never got the human work confused with "natural language processsing."

Today, of course, the Ask editors are gone and the queries hit a crawler database and get processed like other search engines do, for the most part. But the legacy of being the "natural language" search engine remains :)

Barry I think you Danny and possibly even Jeeves itself have completely missed the point. Google was head and shoulders above the rest of the search industry in terms of quality when they hit the internet and grew by leaps and bounds. Yahoo and MSN were barely concentrating on search years ago. It was a loss leader.
That's just wrong, sorry. Yahoo started as a search engine. That was core to its popularity, and it has continued to be one of the main reasons why people went back to Yahoo. The company did let its attention shift off of improving search from around 99-01/02, but it hardly stopped offering it.

Its all going to come down to marketing and branding. Nobody is going to run away from the field on quality the way Google did a few years ago.
Perhaps we will be in a new era, where since all players are essentially equal (and I generally agree with that), he who brands best will win. But I still think you won't just be able to spend your way into long-lasting audience. Word of mouth has been and will continue to be powerful. If I can get a quality gain or a really compelling feature, that might pull me over. The personal search features that Yahoo, Ask or even a9 have? I was seriously going over to using them as my primary search engine because I didn't like not having a record of my searches for easy access at Google. The Google Desktop solved that problem, though I don't think they themselves really see that as a personal search solution.

Overall, I've written and spoken before that among the majors, I see a TV network model. They'll all gain or lose a bit, but they'll all stay majors. So Google, Yahoo, MSN are the ABC, NBC and CBS of search. Ask and AOL are like FOX and UPN, smaller, but still a good business to have. Spending a ton of marketing money isn't going to turn FOX into ABC. Programming might, but it will still be a tough challenge to replicated the other advantages someone with an established network has.

Its all going to come down to marketing and branding. Nobody is going to run away from the field on quality the way Google did a few years ago.

Allthough being a great believer in the value of branding and "packaging" I do not beleiev the stage we are at right now is the end of search technology evolution. Far from! The fact is that the search technology we have today are not very good (far from perfectly relevant and useful to all people at all times) and a future Internet with many times more content than we have today will make the current technology feel even weaker. We need something better. Much better. The question is if it will come through search evolution or with a "bang".

Personally I still think it is possible for the right people and the right company (with the right kind of money!) to come up with something that is 100 times better than what we have now. Not just a little better but dramatically better. Something that would make all current search engines look like trash. I am not saying it WILL happen - just that it very well could ... In my years in technology development I just learned that it dosn't pay to believe that "Nobody is going to run away from the field on quality ..." :)

Well I agree entirely with Mikkel and I think Marcia got it right a little while back. To use Gallup's 5 P's of Marketing, I think you've got to move off the P for Publicity and go for the P of Product and the P of People. Look at catering to a particular niche of people, say a certain sector of the gentler sex, and find out how they want to search. That will really determine the right Product.

For myself, the clustering offered through the Teoma technology can be built within a reactive multi-stage search process that would really work for me. However I'm probably not in the right niche for AJ.

That's just wrong, sorry. Yahoo started as a search engine. That was core to its popularity, and it has continued to be one of the main reasons why people went back to Yahoo. The company did let its attention shift off of improving search from around 99-01/02, but it hardly stopped offering it.



Sorry Danny. You are an expert in the industry but your statement is incorrect. Search was a loss leader for the portals when Google was hitting the net in exactly the time period you are talking about - 99-02. I never said they stopped offering search. There was no focus. Money was made elsewhere. Google had the best search far and above anyone elses. Yahoo's big focus on search began when they bought Inktomi.

If Ask were mine as a small-site webmaster and I had a limited, very low - even miniscule budget (which I always do, btw - as do many, even most women), considering the fact that the sites I've worked with that had women-oriented products offered on were consistent recipients of Ask traffic, I'd invest the modest resources available as a low-budget net-person in marketing to the people I had seen coming to the sites I'd managed on a consistent basis. That would be women of a certain mind-set and predictable shopping habits.

If I had a little bit more money to spare I'd try to get exposure on sites such as iVillage, which incidentally is where I had my first beginnings as a member and volunteer and then as a staff chat bouncer for a while.

With all due respect, and considerable admiration for Ask/Teoma, it still amazes me that Ask has appeal to what are conceivably the least technical of all internet surfers, while at the same time having the most fascinating and sophisticated of technologies.

It's up to Ask, of course, but I think Marcia is really on to something with her earlier post regarding women - it's hardly an insignificant market, and yet hasn't been really touched, or rather, targetted.

Obviously women are just as interested in getting good results as men, but I've noticed personally will often go about it in a slightly different fashion. Perhaps Ask has the potential to address this.

Interesting idea, and worth exploring, IMO.

Ian

I've always thought Marcia's opinions and ideas for Ask were very sound.

I do appreciate that Ask allows us all a choice: Ask.com for the general public and Teoma.com for a geekier crowd.

For myself I like Teoma a lot. I would love to see a Firefox/Mozilla based toolbar for both Teoma and Ask.

(And I still think a free Add URL form would focus a lot more webmaster attention on Ask.)

I've always thought Marcia's opinions and ideas for Ask were very sound.

I do appreciate that Ask allows us all a choice: Ask.com for the general public and Teoma.com for a geekier crowd.

For myself I like Teoma a lot. I would love to see a Firefox/Mozilla based toolbar for both Teoma and Ask.

(And I still think a free Add URL form would focus a lot more webmaster attention on Ask.)
Add Url pages always get the webmasters attention and they in turn tell the clients to look at the engines!!!!

Allthough being a great believer in the value of branding and "packaging" I do not beleiev the stage we are at right now is the end of search technology evolution. Far from! The fact is that the search technology we have today are not very good (far from perfectly relevant and useful to all people at all times) and a future Internet with many times more content than we have today will make the current technology feel even weaker. We need something better. Much better. The question is if it will come through search evolution or with a "bang".



Totally agree with you. Search has a very long way to go. But because there is so much money in it now (as opposed to the time Google entered the ring) any great advance will be immediately copied by all the big 4 players. Nobody is going to run away from the field anymore. Google did in 2000/01 because all the big portals had no focus on search. There was no money in it until paid search came along.

I was startled when Danny said search was core to Yahoo back then. They didn't even own their search technology in the early 2000s!!!! Yahoo licensed it from Inktomi and Google!!!

I was startled when Danny said search was core to Yahoo back then. They didn't even own their search technology in the early 2000s!!!! Yahoo licensed it from Inktomi and Google!!!
For someone who earlier questioned others for thinking too much as an SEM insider, rather than thinking from the outsider view, it strikes me that you're being very quick to limit the discussion of search only to crawler-based results alone.

Yahoo! were famous for search when their own directory was the technology in use.

In fact, back in the mid-Nineties, Yahoo! were often cited as the top brand of the internet. People in far off countries who'd never seen an office, never mind a PC, had already heard of Yahoo!

Loss leader? Banner Ads at the top of all SERPs were sold. Certainly not for the money that we now know PPC advertising can bring, but not for pitances either. Search was monetised long, long before Pay-per-Click arrived. Even sponsored listings of a form far pre-date Pay-per-click as we know it. It may not have generated the levels of profit expected today, but search was not intended to be a loss-leader.

Sorry dude but I think I am being misinterpreted again. I am was not referring to the mid 90s in any of my posts. I am referring to 2000-2002 when Google was hitting the scene when in fact search was a loss leader for all the portals as internet advertising was having its implosion. The loss leader comment is not my interpretation either. It was written in countless internet stories including the WSJ if I remember correctly. It may have been the NY Times. I could go try to dig up some of those articles. The portals considered search a loss leader. Lots of people used it. No money to be made until Overture's big move with paid search. But if Yahoo was licensing technology from Inktomi and Google in the early 2000s its my opinion that as a company that they were not focused on search.

Isn't this interesting. Are these figures correct? If they are shouldn't the conversation be focused on ISH search properties (4.3% market share?) instead of focusing on Ask.com (1.8% market share?)

Excerpt -

What's New with Search Engines
December 2004

By Andrea Greene, Internet Marketing Specialist

KEEPING SCORE—WHICH SEARCH ENGINES ARE MOST POPULAR?
Here is the most recent breakdown of "search engine share" from comScore showing the most popular search engine networks ranked by most searches performed.

36.8% for Google
26.6% for Yahoo, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Overture.com
14.5% for MSN
12.8% for AOL, Netscape and other Time Warner sites
4.3% for Excite, iWon, MyWay, and MyWebSearch
1.8% for Ask Jeeves and Teoma
1.3% for InfoSpace, Dogpile, and WebCrawler
0.8% for Lycos and HotBot
1.1% for Others

http://www.dynamicsonline.com/tip0412.html

Sorry dude but I think I am being misinterpreted again. I am was not referring to the mid 90s in any of my posts. I am referring to 2000-2002 when Google was hitting the scene when in fact search was a loss leader for all the portals as internet advertising was having its implosion...
... No money to be made until Overture's big move with paid search.
Google began in 1998, around the same time as Goto.com which later became Overture.com. By 2000, Goto.com were expanding beyond the US and moving into the UK market as the first step into Europe, and Google had not merely hit the scene, but had toppled Altavista from the #1 spot in most people's eyes.

You're not being misunderstood in these dates, simply corrected by those who were already fully esconced in the business by that time, and helping companies to ride-out the sudden implosion of the advertising market.

MSN were charging some £40 CPM for banner ads even in 2001.

Yes, many search engines ran into trouble and sought bigger or more successful revenue streams, with the classic Northern Light deciding to try a paid subscription model for income, with Yahoo having successfully instituted PFI in its directory, with Looksmart trying desperately to change horses mid-ride from PFI to PPC, etc.

The reason that search was a loss-leader was due to the expense of providing it, in terms of hiring experts, setting up infrastructure, etc. Competing in the search marketplace is not cheap. Not if you aim to retain future marketshare, and so have to continually fund development, not just produce a product that you can sell right now.

But if Yahoo was licensing technology from Inktomi and Google in the early 2000s its my opinion that as a company that they were not focused on search. Is that better?
Yahoo gained a 10 percent share of Google as part of that deal. Gaining a pretty big slice of an upcoming competitor is a smart move. They used what was the best at the time, as such improved their results, and came out ahead in every respect in the long run.

Are you missing the point that Yahoo! had the funds to hire all the tech of Google, get part of the company as part of the deal, but Google (nor inktomi) had the funds to buy or hire Yahoo tech?

Yahoo still had the money to buy Overture (which by then included all the search tech and patents of Altavista and FAST) and Inktomi too just a couple of years later.

I think it would be a mistake to assume that Yahoo! did not look at the whole matter as a standard 'build or buy' decision, looking at the costs at the time, and as things changed, of what it would cost to build a rival to Google, what it cost to simply use Google, and what the returns were. All in all, Yahoo! are by far the more stable and secure business right now.

If yahoo are one of the portals that you believe had "no focus on search" at the time when they paid big bucks to use the best search tech (Google) of the time, and into the bargain made sure to play the long-term strategic game and grab a significant slice of Google shares into the same move then I have to humbly submit you're missing something vital.

People don't spend money on what they are not focused on.

Your argument doesn't hold water there.

That doesn't mean that everything you have said is flawed. It means that one of your statements is flawed, and detracting from the others which may be far more sound.

MUSCLE13, I also have a problem matching the dates and statements you post with what I experienced back then. In the exact timeframe I consulted several major European portals on search issues and I promise you, they where all VERY concerned with it. Basically they all needed help with:

1) How to improve search - and beat the Google in their increasing popularity

2) How to integrate search with the portal (in this is where most of the internal fight went on as the portal folks goal was to keep users on the site and the search peoples goal was to send them away!)

3) How to monetize search

All in all they where all very, very focused on search, they all knew it was going to stay around and be a very important part of the game. They may not all have made the best decisions on how to move forward but I can't recall any of them having droped their focus or interest in search.

The fact that many of them, including Yahoo, licensed the technology from other is, to me, no sign of lack of interest. It's just a wise business decision for many. In fact, I personally recmmended several European portals to drop their own technology in favor of licensing whatever fit their needs best. Personally, I still believe that developing crawler/algoritmic search on a local level is not going to be profitable. Remember, back in 99 we developed for fun with no focus on money - in 2000-02 we "suddenly" had to be profitable (what a party killer :))

I was startled when Danny said search was core to Yahoo back then. They didn't even own their search technology in the early 2000s!!!! Yahoo licensed it from Inktomi and Google!!!
Exactly like Black Knight said, my reference was to them having human editors. That was core to search. Yahoo -- longer than anyone else -- has been a major search engine that quickly gained and retained a giant share of search. Google hurt that a bit, but it hardly crippled Yahoo. And Yahoo wouldn't have survived that Google onslaught if quality search hadn't been core to what it offered.

Ironically, I think all the search engines are harming themselves now by relying so much on technology. Go search on Google for robots.txt (http://www.google.com/search?&q=robots%2Etxt). . Notice that you are getting links to the robots.txt files of popular sites in the top results, no doubt as a result of people linking to them and citing as examples. A human editor could easily pick out ten sites that are relevant to the topic of robots.txt and solve that. But Google loves the automation.

Yahoo is better, but still the White House robots.txt file comes up because of controversy (http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3105111) over what it blocked last year. FYI, MSN Search and Ask do even better -- but it wouldn't be hard to do other queries where some human intervention would be helpful.

Google did in 2000/01 because all the big portals had no focus on search. There was no money in it until paid search came along.
As for search as a loss leader, I'm with Black Knight on this again. I'll add that the key reason why paid listings were pushed for sooner by the majors was simply because there are more lucrative things to do.

If Google had started in 96-97, they wouldn't have done paid listings either -- and they've have had just as much trouble with portal deals falling apart. My The End For Search Engines? (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2163461) article from 2001 goes into depth about how the various search engines were trying to make money and decided the portal path was the way to go, after watching the Open Text paid listings fiasco.

Ok Guys. By Google hitting the scene I meant when Google was starting to get really big and popular late 2000-2002. I remember in early 2001 even when both Ask Jeeves and iWon each had more users than Google in the monthly ratings. A ton more. My thinking is Google had great technology, Yahoo and MSN were licensing other's technology and Google stole all the market share because they were just that much better than everyone else. Nowadays Yahoo owns search technology, MSN is creating their own, Ask owns Teoma and nobody will let Google run away from the field in terms of search quality the way they did in the early 2000s.

My concern with Jeeves is their lack of marketing. ISH properties have more than twice the search share of Ask and Teoma according to the Comscore numbers I posted yesterday from a web site
(are those numbers accurate because they surprised the heck out of me?) With all the great technology ASK has should their metasearch sites (MyWay. MyWebsearch, or even iWon) be grabbing the lions share of the search queries in the company? They gotta market themselves!

Quite honestly Danny when you see Comscore Qsearch numbers of 4.3% share for ISH properties and 1.8% share for Ask.com and Teoma search doesn't it make you wonder what in the world is going on with the company?

I tried to confirm those numbers and I did see those QSearch numbers from summer 04 listed in an article on SEW.

ISH being larger than Ask. Makes me question the comScore numbers more.

First of all, BEFORE the ISH purchase, they weren't even registering at all with the comScore search ratings. When we asked about that, suddenly ISH was added. What you decide to count has an impact on the ratings you report.

I still like the comScore figures more than any of the ones out there, but you have to take them all with a big grain of salt. That's why I like to look at lots of ratings. Hopefully the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Going back - Ask is 1.8? OK, that's pretty much going to be all to Ask.com. Teoma will have a tiny, tiny amount of that. Maybe 0.1%.

Now ISH? What's that? That's going to be Excite, and iWon, and MyWay.com and My Web Search. Which one gets which share? Could be Excite has 1.2 percent, iWon has 1.1 percent, MyWay 1 percent and My Web Search 1 percent. I don't know -- but the point is, even at 1.8 percent, Ask might be the most important, most popular site of the bunch that's owned.

Now come back to marketing. Which of all of these do you push. iWon and Excite have been pushed in the past. I think the traffic they have is the natural remnant, the devolution of that past marketing. I think they've probably reached the lowest point.

You could pour money trying to market them back up -- and do Ask as well -- or you could choose a flagship one. If it were me, I'd make that Ask. I think it has the best rep of all of them.

ISH to me gives Ask more reach, not really more great opportunity for outreach. They've grabbed traffic, it will help give them more revenue (hopefully much more than they paid for the traffic) and may help boost the building up of Ask.com that's been underway. But Ask is the gem, with Teoma's technology being at the heart of it -- plus a lot of smart, scrappy people at Ask looking at ways to distinguish the site.

Just a quick thing which, I think, is likely to be of interest to the contributors of this thread.

Today I did an interview with Jim Lanzone from Jeeves/Teoma. But not only that, we were joined by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis, who, as Andrew Goodman would say, put the whizbang on the doohickey at Teoma :)

What an honour it was to have one of the world's leading scientists in the field take such an interest in what's happening on the webmaster side and thank us all for our work. Yes, that's right, very complimentary about our optimisation services he was.

I have to tell you, it was a fascinating conversation. Jim was very forthcoming about the current situation at Jeeves re brand and market share. And Apostolis was just so upbeat about how 2005 will be the year that Teoma technology and Jeeves really makes its mark.

Some excellent insights from the great man himself on the future of search. And I am DELIGHTED that he confirmed that my thoughts about PageRank, being the Emperor's new clothes as I've often referred to it as, appears to be correct.

Yep, that's a tantalising little excerpt!

I'm also very happy that Jim posted here at the forum as Jim and not Jeevesguy! I have this nightmare about having to start an interview one day with the words "so Mr GoogleGuy, tell me about yourself..." (or Mr YahooGuy, whatever!)

Back in my radio days I did an interview with Meatloaf, and you can imagine what I felt having to call him that for an hour...

The full transcript (as usual) will be in the next newsletter which should be around next week (time and British Airways allowing).

Meanwhile, here's something that I'd missed at the BBC (slap on the wrist, what with me being a Brit and all) which Apostolis pointed out to me and mentioned that it would be of interest to the contributors of this thread. I think he's right:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4003193.stm


Cheers!

Mike.

ISH being larger than Ask. Makes me question the comScore numbers more.



Danny this is from the March 2004 press release of the Jeeves ISH merger -

"In December 2003, Interactive Search Holdings' Web properties reached 17 percent of domestic Internet users. Additionally, Interactive Search Holdings had approximately 700 million searches in the fourth quarter. This compares to 680 million searches on Ask Jeeves' proprietary sites during the same period."

http://www.irconnect.com/askjinc/pages/news_releases.html?d=53659

Now that is not including Excite search in ISH numbers because InfoSpace owns Excite Search. ISH has no ownership in the Excite Search box at all. So the ISH numbers are MyWay, MyWebsearch/MySearch, and iWon.

It is my undertstanding from earnings conference calls that ISH was growing even larger in early 2004 and the spread was even greater, So ISH was definitely doing more queries than Ask according to Jeeves own numbers. Don't know about second half 2004. They didn't talk about it as separate companies in the 3rd quarter release.

Now to get down to the real deal which I love talking about - Marketing. I agree with you Danny that Jeeves should focus on the Ask.com site. But here is my reasoning - I think MyWay will be the biggest part of the company and thats because Dell is distributing it as a default portal on their new computers. So I can accept MyWay's "marketing" as partnering with Dell. MyWebSearch is basically distributed as a toolbar with various proprietary FunWebProducts - Smiley Central, Cursor Mania, Popular ScreenSavers, FunbuddyIcons etc. Thats all over the internet, Very widely marketed online so I can accept MyWebSearch download distribution strategy. I cannot rationalize the total lack of offline marketing for iWon when it was so heavily marketed offline a few years ago and a top 10 site. To let it just wither out there is ludicrous to me. I further cannot rationalize no big marketing campaign for Ask.com with all the improvements they have made with Teoma and the site. Ask should be considered priority and marketed heavily! Excite - What can anybody say about that? Nothing really to say. They don't own the Excite search box so to promote Excite would be useless to Jeeves.

Sure hope Jeeves is reading this thread. Love the product, hate the marketing.

Just listened to the net feed of Jeeves CEO presentation at the Smith Barney conference yesterday. It was good to hear that some focus will be put on improving iWon's user base this year. The acknowledgement of the lack of marketing and lack of improvements for the iWon site over the last couple of years was certainly good to hear. Also the strategy of eventually driving the ISH user base into Ask Jeeves search is very smart. That will take time. Off-line Marketing for Jeeves was discussed very vaguely but at least they are thinking about it. I was glad he mentioned that there is a segment of internet users that know the name of the various Jeeves sites but DON'T KNOW they are still around after the internet crash years ago. That problem is something I specifically discussed on this thread that is so true. Marketing has to be used to get all of the old Jeeves and iWon users back.

Interesting to note this from Reuters on Piper Jaffray report on Jeeves today

Excerpt -

"Ask Jeeves is not only remaining a meaningful search alternative, but is gaining faster than most other players," he said.

He estimates the company's usage rates rose 18 percent from the third quarter, the highest increase for the sector.

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh1026 1_2005-01-14_15-00-38_n14604630_newsml

What I take away from this news is that the multibrand search strategy of Ask.com, MyWay, MyWebSearch and iWon is working well. From listening to the conference yesterday my opinion is there is particular strength in MyWebSearch growth as well as a seasonal rebound in Ask.com

It is also very interesting to note that according to the Alexa daily rankings- MyWebsearch has more users than Ask.com, and MyWay has more users than Ask as well. This points to the strength of the ISH acquistion

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=medium&compare_sites=mywebsearch.com&y=t&url=www.ask.com#top

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=medium&compare_sites=myway.com&y=t&url=www.ask.com#top

Regarding MyWay and distribution:

Getting "installed" or "bundled" on Dell (or other big name) computers is an old story familiar to many losing companies over the years, especially those who have stock prices to worry about. I keenly watched as Corel Wordperfect boasted of such deals. These announcements typically helped insiders sell stock for a day or two (or a couple of hours), and did little else for the company.

As for the various cursor and smiley funbuddy products, a lot of it sounds like it might be a great way to push crap traffic on unsuspecting PPC advertisers. It makes me think that ASKJ's revenues may need to be watched with an even closer and more sceptical eye going forward.

Like Danny, there are so many numbers I just don't believe, so I just keep looking at different ones. Even the numbers you showed us (recent comScore numbers) are different from other accounts of the same numbers. Since the full comScore reports are probably quite long, let's say you're on Wall Street and you're used to pulling up one type of super-aggregated reach number to "boil down" the search wars for your purposes. Some other analyst uses a semi-aggregated breakdown of search share and yet another likes to focus on a more detailed breakdown.

That none of us can yet appear to get our numbers quite straight is not our fault, as the ratings agencies don't seem that interested in holding seminars on how to interpret them. :)

All I know is that when I poll non-specialist family and friends, none uses Ask Jeeves, Excite, or Teoma as far as I can tell. These sub-5% market share numbers are very real. And search matters a great deal now to many people.

Could it be that Teoma is a very fine bit of search technology caught in a company which is trying to keep its cash flow healthy with smiley buddy cursor scumware ads? In a perfect world Teoma would have remained independent much longer. But as long as companies like AOL are still interested in search and have reasonably wide distribution, there is a chance that this technology could be licensed and impress more people. Unfortunately neither MSN nor Yahoo will be looking to make a deal.

Danny this is from the March 2004 press release of the Jeeves ISH merger -

"In December 2003, Interactive Search Holdings' Web properties reached 17 percent of domestic Internet users. Additionally, Interactive Search Holdings had approximately 700 million searches in the fourth quarter. This compares to 680 million searches on Ask Jeeves' proprietary sites during the same period."

http://www.irconnect.com/askjinc/pages/news_releases.html?d=53659

Now that is not including Excite search in ISH numbers because InfoSpace owns Excite Search. ISH has no ownership in the Excite Search box at all. So the ISH numbers are MyWay, MyWebsearch/MySearch, and iWon.

It is my undertstanding from earnings conference calls that ISH was growing even larger in early 2004 and the spread was even greater, So ISH was definitely doing more queries than Ask according to Jeeves own numbers. Don't know about second half 2004. They didn't talk about it as separate companies in the 3rd quarter release.

Now to get down to the real deal which I love talking about - Marketing. I agree with you Danny that Jeeves should focus on the Ask.com site. But here is my reasoning - I think MyWay will be the biggest part of the company and thats because Dell is distributing it as a default portal on their new computers. So I can accept MyWay's "marketing" as partnering with Dell. MyWebSearch is basically distributed as a toolbar with various proprietary FunWebProducts - Smiley Central, Cursor Mania, Popular ScreenSavers, FunbuddyIcons etc. Thats all over the internet, Very widely marketed online so I can accept MyWebSearch download distribution strategy. I cannot rationalize the total lack of offline marketing for iWon when it was so heavily marketed offline a few years ago and a top 10 site. To let it just wither out there is ludicrous to me. I further cannot rationalize no big marketing campaign for Ask.com with all the improvements they have made with Teoma and the site. Ask should be considered priority and marketed heavily! Excite - What can anybody say about that? Nothing really to say. They don't own the Excite search box so to promote Excite would be useless to Jeeves.

My sense of Piper's recent statements on the search sector is that they're too bullish. There's a bit of an irrationally exuberant tone there. There are others on Wall Street who do not position themselves as search industry advocates who do like search but have recently expressed more reserved sentiments and have offered what I consider to be fair growth projections for the leading players.

Let's just hold on for a year and see how fast Ask Jeeves is really gaining. Is this a real trend? Hardly seems worth getting so excited about.

MUSCLE13, are you a shareholder in ASKJ? You certainly do get very excited about investor-related conference calls and the like. Do you own stock in other technology companies? Do you diversify into other sectors and asset classes? I am afraid you have tunnel vision on ASKJ! Might be time to sell and take a breath.

Interesting to note this from Reuters on Piper Jaffray report on Jeeves today

Excerpt -

"Ask Jeeves is not only remaining a meaningful search alternative, but is gaining faster than most other players," he said.

He estimates the company's usage rates rose 18 percent from the third quarter, the highest increase for the sector.

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh1026 1_2005-01-14_15-00-38_n14604630_newsml

What I take away from this news is that the multibrand search strategy of Ask.com, MyWay, MyWebSearch and iWon is working well. From listening to the conference yesterday my opinion is there is particular strength in MyWebSearch growth as well as a seasonal rebound in Ask.com

Regarding MyWay and distribution:

Getting "installed" or "bundled" on Dell (or other big name) computers is an old story familiar to many losing companies over the years, especially those who have stock prices to worry about. I keenly watched as Corel Wordperfect boasted of such deals. These announcements typically helped insiders sell stock for a day or two (or a couple of hours), and did little else for the company.

As for the various cursor and smiley funbuddy products, a lot of it sounds like it might be a great way to push crap traffic on unsuspecting PPC advertisers. It makes me think that ASKJ's revenues may need to be watched with an even closer and more sceptical eye going forward.



My concern with Jeeves is that they have never once announced their Dell MyWay portal deal. I had to search SEC filings to find it! Their Dell portal has gone from 1% of MyWay traffic to 12% in a matter of months according to the Alexa ratings so it is having an impact but the company doesn't promote it. As I have stated many times on this thread I think Jeeves marketing is just terrible. Personally I think MyWay will be the biggest part of the company. According to the ratings I have seen it already has the most users of any of Jeeves properties.

I have very similar concerns as you on MyWebSearch/FunWebProducts. It is extremely popular right now but the products I have seen thus far are very faddish much like toys. I would like to see more sustainable longterm products because I believe downloadable apps and toolbars are where the whole search industry is heading.

MUSCLE13, are you a shareholder in ASKJ? You certainly do get very excited about investor-related conference calls and the like. Do you own stock in other technology companies? Do you diversify into other sectors and asset classes? I am afraid you have tunnel vision on ASKJ! Might be time to sell and take a breath.

I own stock in many companies not just technology. I am a very conservative investor. My biggest holding is an S&P 500 index fund which I have held for the the last 15 plus years, and continue to invest in. I am also into real estate investing.

I think search is just about the best growth business out there (outside of Howard's satellite radio :) ). I think Jeeves multibrand strategy is terrific. I am so down on their lack of marketing for Ask and iWon. One thing that amazes me is people (including posters here) talk about Jeeves search and Excite search as if Jeeves owns Excite search traffic. They don't. Its really an Ask.com, MyWay, MyWebSearch/MySearch, iWon search strategy that is the heart of the matter here.

To me, you have a baffling view of marketing as the be-all and end-all, one that gets expressed on every thread full of eager shareholders for whatever company. "What we have here is great if those boys would only push it harder!" I can't tell you how many posts like that I read during the bubble era for now-defunct companies. The tone makes me wonder. The strategy makes me wonder. You can't push on a string.

Is it really that simple? Have you read Free Prize Inside by Godin?

At least we're agreed on Howard's satellite radio.

As I've clearly stated many times, I have always been impressed with Ask Jeeves' potential and with its Teoma technology, and in my above post I suggested that MSN and Yahoo will not be making a lot of deals with third parties, but AOL still might.

While I'm not completely down on Ask Jeeves, I am trying to inject a note of balance here because frankly MUSCLE13 you seem to have appointed yourself their cheerleader. One wonders why. What have they ever done for you? Is a "multi-brand strategy" really so fascinating? Isn't that what Terra Lycos said they were pursuing? "People love Hotbot, Quote.com, Raging Bull..." We all know how that turned out.

I'm sure the folks at Ask Jeeves don't like hearing this stuff and much prefer to hear your "Jeeves is great" thoughts, but I don't feel that anyone who considers themselves a real search enthusiast feels that comfortable with the holding-company aspects of Jeeves. The ISH and other traffic is not core to the search experience online but it is core to helping Jeeves' bottom line. In that regard, then, my comments are no different from someone talking about what great products Google has but expressing dismay that they've gone after revenues too quickly by building the AdSense network too quickly, etc. Those who are able to focus on search alone can see a lot of good in Teoma technology, as Mike G. does. Those who focus merely on the revenue picture can talk about Jeeves as a viable company. But do those parts fit together well? Can Jeeves become a real search destination by getting its monthly share of searches up over 15% permanently, thus really making money from search, or will it continue to be a minor player which somewhat makes money from search, while shoring up the balance sheet with unrelated income from a motley collection of online properties?

To conclude, Ask Jeeves has long needed to take things to the next level, perhaps by introducing a really innovative natural-language question-answering technology as promised -- something that people find cool, as cool as the iPod. There's an outside chance they still might be able to pull it off.

I agree 100%, AndrewGoodman. Strategy is about what you say 'NO' to, as well as what is your central core. If your multi-brand strategy allows you to keep anything that makes cash in your portfolio, you will certainly find that your management resource is diffused over too many disparate elements.

The Little Engine Might, provided it's not asked to drag along too much dead wood.

Andrew, I don't consider myself a cheerleader at all. I find it baffling how Jeeves will ever compete marketing wise versus companies like Yahoo or MSN with their 300 million dollar marketing budgets. Thats why I am so down on Jeeves marketing. They are a tiny company going against big boys, and I think marketing and distribution is where the future of this business is. They have to be extremely innovative.

I love discussing search but I look at it from a very different perspective than you SEM guys. The thing that really shocks me here is you guys are supposed to be the experts in the industry. Andrew I read your Traffick web page when Jeeves made the ISH deal. I could not believe your focus when the deal was made was Excite. Others in your field have focused on Excite as well even on this thread. It is baffling. Jeeves doesn't own the Excite search box. Infospace does. The deal wasn't about Excite search at all. They bought the Excite portal minus the search box. The deal was about MyWay, MyWebSearch/MySearch and iWon. Properties none of the SEM community writes about and properties that have more users than Ask and Teoma and the entire essence of ISH search. Personally I think you guys just concentrate on technology and ignore a huge aspect of search which is distribution. My opinion. No offense intended.

Andrew, one other note. On this thread, Danny even questioned that ISH had more searches than Ask and Teoma until I pointed out Jeeves releasing exact numbers when the deal was made. ISH had more searches. I think you guys need to focus more on the distribution aspect of search. It is not just a technology game. ISH owned no search technology at the time of the deal, just distribution and still had more searches than Ask. Its a huge part of the business that is ignored.

One thing I really hope is that Jeeves people are reading this thread. Jeeves -There are a ton of SEM guys here that are going to tell you to push technology. Thats the way to win. These are the same people who think Excite is the main part of the Jeeves ISH deal. Pay attention to a regular guy like me. I'm not an SEM guy. I am just a regular everyday auditor. One of the millions of regular users on the web who are not involved in SEM. Push your product to us regular guys. Honestly, the rest of us outside SEM can't tell the difference between Jeeves, Google, MSN or Yahoo search technology. We are not that bright :) . Pay attention to us. Advertise to us. You get us and the advertisers will follow.

It is not just a technology game

No, it's a marketing game and the fact is to many of us and the clioents we operate AskJeves - even including everything they own, is just not worth our time. In many reagions they don't even exist! Please tell me why I, as a marketer, should care anything about any engine that does not produce value to the clients I have?

Mikkel - If Jeeves had 20% of the searches on the web instead of just 7% your clients would care an awful lot. Its all about marketshare. Jeeves won't increase their share of searches unless they market to the masses. Nobody is going to run away from the field technology wise anymore the way Google did. There is way too much money in search. The difference will be in branding and marketing. Jeeves brand is in an extremely weak position compared to Yahoo, Google and MSN. Thats where the focus should be.

Andrew looks at iWon and laughs. Said it is not even search on this thread. That is exactly where Jeeves should be focusing. iWon has triple the amount of searches per user per month than Ask. Market iWon bigtime. It has huge mass appeal.

Nobody is going to run away from the field technology wise anymore the way Google did.

I absolutely don't agree to that! Do you really think all great inventions have been made? Maybe it's just because I have been working with creative development all my life (first in music and arts and now marketing) that I just don't believe there is ever an end to great creative ideas - things, or ways to do things that nobody ever thought of before. Things that makes life, or search, not just a little better but hundreds or thousands of times better in one big leap. It happens all the time and it could very well happen again. You are blind if you can't see that :)


[/QUOTE]If Jeeves had 20% of the searches on the web instead of just 7% your clients would care an awful lot. [QUOTE]

Only if they did so in the regions my clients operate :) They would not care even if AskJeves had 70% of the market if it is the US only and it seems to me thats all you are focused on. Sorry, but we are a few global marketers in here that thinks way beyond that border.

Mikkel, I absolutely agree with you on both points. I think you misunderstood me on technology. Search technology is at a very early point in its creation. There will be huge leaps forward. The truth is all those leaps forward will be either copied by the big players or bought by the big players. There is way too much money in search now. Nobody will be allowed to go head and shoulders above the field without the all the big players jumping in.


On global search. 100% agree there too. Jeeves is in Japan now. They have been in England for awhile. They are going all over Europe this year. BUT look at the marketing. MyWay went intio England a couple of months ago. I found MyWayUK doing a random search. Did Jeeves even announce MyWay has expanding to England yet? No. Not even a press release. They have a Dell MyWay portal in the UK too. No announcement. The company's marketing is extremely weak in my opinion. That's where my pessimism for Jeeves comes from. Technology is only great if people know about it.

Things that makes life, or search, not just a little better but hundreds or thousands of times better in one big leap. It happens all the time and it could very well happen again.

Mikkel what do you think of Answers.com? It has nothing to do with Jeeves but would that site fit your description of making search so many times better? Very interesting site.

Only time will tell :)

Closing this thread, and starting a new one based on the past two months of actions taken by Ask Jeeves. New thread is named The Little Engine That Could - Part II (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4285), since I feel they have done.