It has been a struggle for Ask Jeeves, IMO, to get out of the "teoma" shadow. Ask Jeeves owns teoma, but it really doesn't need to brand teoma as the engine that powers ask jeeves. like Google and Yahoo and now MSN, it wants to be know as Ask Jeeves search.

In that interview (http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Feb05/apostolos.html) I quoted now, three times in the forums, Jim from Ask said:
It is all Ask Jeeves now. As Apostolos said earlier, it was only seven people and it's now into triple digits.

I mean, regardless of the brand name out there, we're one company. Once group. Ask Jeeves is as much Teoma as Teoma is Ask Jeeves.

I have been in communication over the past month with Jim via email. He is very sensitive to the idea of Teoma, he called Teoma a "theory", which is very true. It will be very interesting to see the brand migration (if that is what you call it). I don't know how many normal searchers even heard of Teoma, but no one (except maybe Google) would want to upset the SEM industry.

I cannot see them promoting Teoma to the general public and dilute the Ask brand. They may keep the Teoma site up but not promote it.

Teoma has had it's chance to gain traction and it has not. Ask is the brand for public consumption and that is where the money is.

I like the whole "PageRank isn't being used anymore" question :D

this has been said before by others but I'll say it again -- I just don't see ask going anywhere while they are just giving us google adwords results. FF browsers get less, but IE, 90% of the browser market, is getting what, 7 - 9 PPC ads?

I don't care how great teoma is -- if you assume that the x amount of people scroll straight past the paid ads and look at the organic results, how many of those people are going to bother using ask jeeves, and annoy themselves with constant scrolling to see what they want to see?

You ignore the fact that only 16% of the users can actually distinguish between Organic results and sponsored results.
You are talking about a minority here. I mean it is only the informed/ technologically educated users who can distinguish ads and organic results, and these are the people that tend to use Firefox. Hence, Firefox will have lesser ads. This is a win win situation.

Also, you have to realize that for search engines to survive, there have to be people who click on ads, otherwise nobody will survive...

I agree, those are good points. still, even if it's only 16% who can tell the difference, 16% of 350 million daily searches (or whatever the latest number is) is a lot of people.

but anyway, putting the google adwords so prominently is the reason why no one is going to be saying "wow, ask jeeves really delivers something that the other engines can't match" -- all they're delivering is repackaged google stuff..

I don't know.. they make all these big changes, introduce my jeeves and all that stuff, and then cover it up with adwords stuff.. The point is, no matter how many improvements they make, the further down they push their own improvements, the less anyone is going to notice or care.

obviously they're doing something right because they've managed to keep hold of their portion of the market for quite a long time so I can't knock them at all. but I don't use AJ, and neither do most other people, there's definitely a reason for that.