Leading off with a blog entry at the Ask.com blog, named What Should We Do? Ask.com asked the blog readers about launching something around April 1, does it make sense to do it, if it may be perceived as a joke. Of course, they released it, "due to popular demand." Ask.com releases for the first time, a full press release via its blog, with the title Ask.com Introduces RhymeRank™.

Tonight at 6PM (PST), to be released in "Gamma mode" at Ask.com is RhymeRank, "Cutting Edge Technology Provides Phaster and Phresher Related Search Results."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

As I reported at SEW Blog, Wall Street Journal's principal technology columnist, Walter Mossberg wrote a raving article on Ask.com named Ask.Com's New Look Scores Big Points Against Search Rivals. This is huge for The Little Engine That Could. With a recent spike in market share, and its new marketing initiatives I am very exciting for Ask.com's future potential.

Here are some quotes from Mossberg;

I've been testing the new Ask.com against the search champ, Google. I've found that in terms of relevant results and ease of use, Ask holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches. It has some very nice features Google lacks, including previews of the sites it finds, an easy way to narrow or broaden your search results, and frequent top-of-the-screen answers that lead you directly to core information.

In general, Ask's search-results pages are richer and better organized than typical Google results, and they give greater priority to content over ads.

Google is still great, and I'm not suggesting everyone abandon it. But Ask.com is well worth a try if you want to benefit from some features that go beyond Google. Like the George Mason basketball team, it just may surprise you.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

John Battelle reports on comScore report that shows Ask.com gaining in market share from Q4 '04 to '05 by 32.8% and Google growing over the same time span by 24.7%. Yahoo dropped in market share by 0.3% and MSN dropped by 2.7%. Still the overall leaders in market share as of Q4 2005 are; Google with 39.8%, Yahoo with 29.3%m MSN with 14.3% and Ask.com with 6.6% of search market share.

With Ask.com's TV recent TV Blitz it will be interesting to see the impact it has in Q1 of 2006.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

In our continued Ask The Moderators thread, the next question we explored was by Viggen. He asked our roundtable of moderators the following question on what he calls; "private search engines."

what search engines are you using for private searches and why...

We opened up a thread named Private Search Engines Explored for moderator only discussion, and last night opened it up for member discussion as well.

I found it interesting in how each moderator interpreted the phrase "private searches." On one hand, does this mean searches conducted at a password protected search engine? Or maybe it means, searches conducted on a company intranet? Perhaps, he is asking about searches one does each day, but are private in nature? Or maybe he is asking about vertical search engines?

The roundtable of moderator's responses were pretty vast.

Rand Fishkin discussed how he uses Del.icio.us to search on tagged content, Ask.com for "non-search type searches" and Yahoo! for link command searches.

Dazzlindonna explained that if private search engines means vertical search engines, she doesn't use them. Donna is a big fan of major search engines and bookmarking for private searches.

Darrin Ward sticks with Yahoo! Search as his default and Google as his back up, he may also use MSN.

Ben (Phoenix) says he doesn't value Yahoo! Search at all, he sticks with Ask.com and Google. He also is a big user of Google Alerts. For internal private searches he uses Desktop Search, like Google Desktop Search. As now uses Bloglines more and more each day.

I personally use RSS News Searches exhaustedly. I subscribe to searches on a few dozen keyword phrases to be notified via RSS about the latest news and discussions taking place about those keyword phrases.

We would love you to join the conversation at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Friday we reported on the Ask commercials, but if you haven't seen them as of yet - you can now. Go to the Ask Blog and read their entry Ask In Primetime. You will need QuickTime to view the commercials.

The first is named the Cafe.

In the midst of an Internet cafe where searchers have yet to evolve, one discovers Ask.com's unique tools starts remembering what it's like to feel human.

The second is named the Animals In Pants.

A scientist using the Binoculars tool on Ask ponders the question of what separates man from beast...and gets some help from an unexpected source.

Major compliments to Ask.com for posting these on the blog. And as always, forum discussion on this specific topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

If you watch some TV in the US or even outside the US, you may have noticed some apes searching on a search engine named Ask.com. Ask.com has released a blitz of TV commercials in Europe and the US to try to show users the unique flavor of Ask powered search and the creative tools Ask provides to it searchers. I have seen one of the commercials, it involves apes searching, representing how its time for a new way to search the Internet. The commercial shows Smart Answers, Binoculars and Ask's other features.

Yea, so you want to see it, don't you. Well, I think I have finally convinced Ask.com to post the commercials at their blog. I have a feeling they will be live sometime today at The Ask Blog, so keep checking (I will update this blog when I know its live).

Forum discussion to break loose at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A thread was created at WebmasterWorld forums named Has ASK Jeeves Updated its Index? but moderator martinibuster. Martinibuster says that he has noticed that Ask.com has been sending him traffic for a page that is about ten days old. That implies that Ask.com's index, which is normally slower to index new pages than Google, Yahoo or MSN, has become fresh with new pages. Martinibuster also believes that Ask.com has "tweaked their algo" to provide higher quality results. For the few searches martinibuster placed, he said the quality is on par with Google and seems to be better than Yahoo results.

Have you been noticing the same thing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

If you visit Ask.com at http://www.ask.com/ today, you will notice that the Ask.com ">home page is green. They have changed the color from red for St. Patrick's Day. In the past Jeeves dressed up; see March 17, 2004 and March 17, 2005. Clicking on the Ask.com green logo takes you to a St. Patrick's Day search as does with Google and Yahoo! (takes you to a non search page) that are also sporting logos for the special day. However, Ask.com's inner search pages are still red, and so is http://uk.ask.com/, however, they do have a special link to a St. Patrick's Day search.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The Ask blog wrote last night Ask.com France: A Fresh Alternative. That post shows that they have updated the look of http://fr.ask.com/ to be consistent of the Ask.com brand. They also noted that the ranking algorithm used at the French engine is "unique." Finally they have many of the same features at Ask France and will be adding "news feeds, maps and itineraries, online shopping, downloads, etc."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

After the keynote, which Barry also covered, I got the opportunity to get introduced with Barry Diller and spend a couple minutes with him. So I asked, "what is your vision in all of this for Ask with regards to Latin America and Spanish searchers in general?". He responed, "Latin America is a very important market for Ask going forward (along with other markets too). I think we're not doing enough and all of that will be changing."

That sounds to me like a COMMITMENT to GROWTH. Perhaps Barry understands that Latin America represents an opportunity to gain market share over its competitors? Smart guy! Then again, what if Ask's competitors are way ahead already and it will difficult to catch up as it has been in the U.S. market. Only time will tell, it's still to early to know. In my opinion, they have all just gotten started within the last 12 months.

Opportunities come and go, very few get a good chance to really profit BIG on them. Outstanding keynote! I see great things going on at Ask.

Jeeves who? Teoma who? Welcome to the new Ask.com. Notice no Jeeves. Notice the new side bar. Chris Sherman has the Search Day write up; Ask Looses Jeeves, Gains New Features.

Barry Diller will be giving his keynote shortly. You can listen live, more information at SEW Blog. If you miss it, we will be covering it here, as we normally do.

Last night Ask posted a final so-long to Jeeves with high taste. The blog entry at the Ask blog was named And Now, Our Feature Presentation… They describe how J.D. Ryznar, a famous film maker, produced a final farewell for Jeeves named Jeeves Leaves.

You learn a lot about Jeeves in that short film. He unmasks himself, he shows deep emotion, he brings out the best in Ask, even beating out Google (kinda) in a basketball game, finally realizing that Jeeves has given all he can to Ask - and that the Ask team can keep up the winning on their own.

In this movie you will laugh, cry and be enlightened. The New York Times gives it two thumbs up (kidding....).....

I posted a forum thread on this video at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and there has been an update to the Search Engine Watch Thread.

Good bye Jeeves.

Senior Member, Dayo_UK at WebmasterWorld posted a very interested thread named Ask Crawl Banned sites? The question posed was, does Ask crawl banned sites? If not, does Teoma bot (Ask's spider) activity suggest that Ask has removed the banned site from it's spam list?

Excellent set of questions. I emailed a contact at Ask to get some answers. And guess what, the answer is not black and white, what is with search. I will phrase the answer in my own words.

When a site is banned in Ask, they cease from crawling the site. However, Ask may crawl a banned site during an "experimental crawl," during a site's ban period. From my understanding, recent and consistent bot activity, may strongly suggest that a banned site, may possibly be reincluded in the next index update. You must be able to differentiate the "experimental" bot activity from the normal bot activity, which may be very hard to do.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Jim Lanzone of Ask Jeeves posted a Thanks, Jeeves blog entry at the Ask Blog. He explains all the reasons why it is time for Jeeves to retire, in that blog post, so it is worth a read. There is also a special Jeeves retirement site at www.jeevesretirement.com/desk.

The Ask.com homepage currently is sporting a link to it as such;

Chris Sherman has the official Search Engine Watch article on Jeeves Retires.

Forum discussion covered here. Goodbye Jeeves.

The other day I reported that Google Raids Ask Jeeves's Offices where Matt Cutts took pictures of Ask Jeeves front desk, through the window. Well, Ask Jeeves caught Matt Cutts on tape and posted it at the Ask Blog under the title A Visitor Among Us.

Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A funny blog post by Matt Cutts named Road trip: Ask Jeeves in Campbell. In his post, he noted that he went to Ask Jeeves in Campbell Pruneyard after eating out in a nearby restaurant. He snapped pictures of the office complex, the signs and even peaked in and snapped an image of the Jeeves cardboard figure behind the Ask Jeeves secretarial desk.

I asked Ask Jeeves to comment on this, but they have no official response as of yet. I expect some type of funny response, possibly even a practical joke by Ask on Google. But time will tell.

For now, you can join the forum discussion on this at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

As I posted at the SEW blog yesterday, Ask Jeeves is going to be dropping the Jeeves butler by the end of this month, according to BBC News UK.

We saw early signs of this coming with Ask France & Japan dropping (or not including) the butler earlier. It is sad that attempts to save the butler seemed to have failed. We covered the rumors of Barry Diller wanting to Rename to Ask Jeeves to Ask a while back, lots of memories will be remembered, including;

• Jeeves9000 - Robo Jeeves
• Aks Jeeves - Jeeves Long Lost Brother
• Jeeves's Make Over
• Jeeves Hide and Go Seek

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums and Cre8asite Forums.

Viggen started a thread at our forums named Does Google hire spammers? It is actually a very interesting question. I asked Tim Mayer of Yahoo! this question at the Yahoo! Party at the Palm's Club Rain at WebmasterWorld Pub Con Vegas 2004. This is how the conversation went...

Tim Mayer came over to me, when I was sitting on some sofa, kind of off in the corner. I asked him he they (Yahoo!) hires top notch spammers in an effort to combat spam. You know, like how governments and large companies hire hackers to prevent being hacked. Tim said they have not, they just hire 'engineers'. Which got me thinking, what if the Yahoo! people decided to pass some special gas through the air at this party. The gas contained a drug that turned spammers into the extreme opposite of a spammer (just a note to readers, I am not using the word 'spammer' in a derogatory fashion). I told Tim, that if they had this solution, it might solve a huge chunk of the spam issues they have overnight. Of course I was joking, everyone at the party were clean, white hats.

But if you look at recent patterns, search engines engineers and top folks are "buddies" with so called spammers. As randfish points out in the thread; "MSN certainly gets the opinions of spammers - particularly in last year's search champs." And yes, Matt Cutts from Google goes out for dinners and talks with spammers very often. Not only that at last years Google Dance DaveN and friends spent a whole night talking with Larry or Sergy (I forget which one) and Matt Cutts in the Google Plex. Yahoo! also invited a bunch of people, half consisting of self-proclaimed search engine spammers to Yahoo! headquarters to discuss the search technology.

Has a search engine ever hired a spammer? Gary Price hired by Ask Jeeves is far from Ask Jeeves hiring a spammer. I did hear a rumor of an old WebmasterWorld player who switched sides of the fence, but I do not know much more about that.

As far as I know, a spammer has never been hired by a search engine as an employee. But yes, they do serve up nice tokens to spammers.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums

I can't remember the last time I said anything negative about Ask Jeeves. But honestly, they haven't been tested much on the Webmaster relations front. So I found a perfect opportunity to test them. Viggen, a well known forum member at many forums, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld forums named Previous Domain Owner Penalty. He basically said that he bought a domain name in 2003 that has a previous penalty, Google told him that. In time, Google and Yahoo released the domain from its penalty, but Ask Jeeves did not. So I told the folks I know at Ask Jeeves to reply to the thread. Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves replied with the following message;

Hello: You can contact us via this page: http://webk.ask.com/contactus

Please choose the "Help with getting your site listed" option and please enter comments on why we should review it.

thanks,
Kaushal Kurapati
Senior Product Manager for Search, Ask Jeeves, Inc.

Great. Now I sit back and track to see how Ask handles this. What is disturbing is that at all the conferences Ask Jeeves says they take all responses seriously and they reply to them by individuals quickly. Why do they do that? Because they don't get the volume of requests that Google or Yahoo gets and they were proud to say they are better at communication than G or Y.

But two weeks later and Viggen has yet to see a response from Ask Jeeves on the topic.

Makes me wonder if Ask Jeeves does take feedback requests seriously?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Kaushal Kurapati emailed me and has now taken care of the issue.

According to C|Net Ask Jeeves improves image search by adding;

New sophisticated image recognition technologies measure attributes such as image type, shape, brightness and contrast level to determine picture quality.

It is hard to tell from the naked eye, so lets do a search on Danny Sullivan. At Google the first result has nothing to do with the Danny Sullivan I was thinking about. But at Ask Jeeves, bingo, the first result is the Danny Sullivan I was thinking about. Of course that is just one search and maybe Ask just got lucky. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Via Gary at the SEW blog Ask Jeeves: Cache Includes the Date and Time Pages Were Last Cached. Although it takes forever for Ask to Index a New Site, they added a feature to the cache pages, that shows the last crawl date of the page. So for this blog, the last time they crawled the homepage here was January 16th, or 4 days ago! That is for a page that updates several times per day. Whereas my corporate site has a cache date of January 13, 2006 5:14:32 AM.

View Large Image

Note that this kind of reveals how fresh the Jeeves index is...

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This morning we wrote about Time to Index & Ranking in MSN is a Week or Less and then I saw a new WebmasterWorld thread in the Ask Jeeves forum named Re Index time in Teoma so I figured I cover that one as well.

The response to that question links to an older WebmasterWorld thread on the same topic named How often does AskJeeves update its index? where Moderator caine says;

Re-index schedule used to be between 3-6 months occasionally a couple in one month in the past, but the level of re-index was always sporadic and mainly shallow, hence why teoma's results outside of g, msn and yahoo/atw is probably the worst.

There is not much buzz about search engine optimization on Ask Jeeves. So it is hard to track down threads with more specifics, that are recent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is huge, huge enough for Danny Sullivan to post an image on the SEW blog. Danny writes at SEW Blog, IAC's Barry Diller To Keynote SES NY 2006 Next Month. Yea, that is right, this is bigger then Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Keynote SES San Jose and probably even bigger then Yahoo Cofounder Jerry Yang To Keynote SES NY last year (keynote notes). I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums, maybe members will post interesting questions Danny can use for the keynote?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Let me start off by saying that I do not know exactly when Ask launched its French version of the engine. It might have been today, I do not see any press releases on it. But there is a brand new thread on the topic at Cre8asite forums named Ask in France where member Nadir points out the Ask logo on http://fr.ask.com/ does not have the "Jeeves" portion in the logo. It is not only Ask France, it is on Ask España launched a few months ago and also no "Jeeves" name on Ask.jp について. However, "Jeeves" is written out at http://uk.ask.com/ and all of them have the Jeeves character logo.

I wish I would have known if the Japan and Mexician versions had Jeeves written out when they launched. Anyway, it is a subtle thing to notice and it may be part of the Ask Jeeves transition to be known as just Ask.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Ask Jeeves released their top searches for the 2005 year yesterday. The details are in release but here at the "top 10 list of Ask Jeeves news searches"

1. President Bush 2. Iraq 3. Hurricane Katrina 4. Tsunami 5. Michael Jackson 6. Britney Spears 7. Natalee Holloway 8. American Idol 9. Xbox 360 10. Angelina Jolie

Danny also blogged about it at SEW Blog and I posted a forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Finally, Ask has begun to offer page translation for some languages. According to the Ask Jeeves blog entry last night named Word Up they are now offering page translation;

Page Translation is now available on Ask.com. Why haven't we had it in the past? Because we didn't have many foreign-language pages in our index. As we approach site launches in Europe next year, the index has taken on a more international flavor. Voila! We need a codebreaker for those who do not speak seven languages (like most of the folks on our international team). Look for the "Translate this page" link.

They are offering more things explained at the Ask Jeeves blog so check it out.

Also, I clicked on Translate this Page for angela merkel search and it allows me to "Save translated page to My Jeeves." Nice addition.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves all are sporting customized logos for the holiday season. When you go to Yahoo.com and click on the top center logo it takes you to http://events.yahoo.com/holiday05/. When you go to Google.com and click on the middle center logo it takes you to Google's first of many holiday season doodles at http://www.google.com/doodle10.html (more to come). And if you go to Ask.com and click on the Jeeves logo, it takes you to a search results page (as a search engine should, imo) for http://www.ask.com/web?q=Happy+Holidays. Now Ask was sporting a snowman logo yesterday, so they are changing things up, possibly daily for the holiday season, keep and eye on them and Google for logo changes.

Folks are discussing the Google logo at DigitalPoint Forums. And I started a thread for Ask Jeeves at our forums here.

Andy shows that The Street reports that Diller Asks Jeeves to Grow. Specifically by 20% says Berkowitz;

Barry Diller's Internet empire expects to increase the staff at its Ask Jeeves search engine by about 20%, Ask Jeeves head Steve Berkowitz says. The expansion comes as Jeeves, which employs 650 workers now, posts solid gains in traffic but remains overshadowed by its more famous and deeper-pocketed rivals. IAC shares are down 10% for the year.

Steve Berkowitz adds that they need to continue to grow and capture market share.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld where Mack explains that this is a "sharp contrast to their UK opperations where they laid off a large proportion of their sales staff." Think they are letting their UK division go to hell?

We have an interesting thread at our forums named Are Ask Jeeves UK Thieves? This thread describes a UK advertiser's experience with working with Ask Jeeves. In the UK, Ask Jeeves has an advertising program named Branded Response. This program is described as follows;

Branded Response is one of Ask Jeeves premium ad placements. These ads appear prominently near the top of the results page and offer strong targeting, performance and branding opportunities. Branded Response placements are triggered by user keywords and offers high click-throughs. Branded Response is integrated within the results and is highly functional by allowing users to perform searches, fill in forms and begin the online buying process within the ad placement.

The member in the forums reports shocking information about how he was treated with the program. He accounts 33% of clicks, being outside of his target market. More shocking then that is that when reported, Ask would not comply with a refund.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

As many of you know, I got the underdog's back, and Ask Jeeves has been the underdog for a while now. Heck, they helped me propose to my soon to be wife, so of course I love them. ClickZ reports that Search Volumes Rise as Market Matures but in that report they note;

Ask Jeeves emerged as the highest-gaining search engine in the period.

The search engine experienced a 77 percent growth in market share to reach 2.6 percent.

I am so happy for Ask. A lot has happened to Ask since our Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could entry here.

Forum discussion posted by yours truely at;

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• Cre8asite Forums
  
• Search Engine Roundtable Forums

You know those people that rarely listen and just talk and talk? They ask questions, and answer them for themselves. They listen to the first part of your question and ignore the last part?

Well, I caught Ask Jeeves possibly doing that. :) Here is the story line....

I received a sales call from the 206 area code. I often use Ask to look up local times, when I am not familiar with a particular area code. I searched on 206 area code which told me right away that the "206 is an area code in
Washington." Right there I knew I was looking at the west coast, but I decided to click on the link that said, "Local Time", which queried Ask automatically time in washington. It had the correct time, however, the box below began to answer a question I did not ask. So when I wanted to refresh the page, by hitting the go button, I noticed that Washington had the same local time as me, in New York. I then looked closer and I noticed it answered my question as "washington, dc" the second time around. Keep in mind that I search on 206 and then clicked on local time, I did not enter in "time in washington", Ask did that for itself.

Ask, you know it all.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

In the past, I blamed MSN for Indexing Ask Jeeves SERPs but then today I saw that Google is also indexing Ask Jeeves SERPs. See the last result (#20) for tuxedos at Google, you will notice;

But then I spoke with Shawn and DigitalPoint and he took a quick look at Ask's robots.txt file, but couldn't find it at http://www.ask.com/robots.txt. So maybe that is the reason the other engines index Ask SERPs? Maybe Ask wants to be indexed? But why wouldn't Google manually exclude Ask SERP's from its index, since it may be duplicate results plus its linking to a direct competitor...

Remember how I proposed? Well, it drove lots of natural links from quality sites all within a few days. Yahoo!'s linkdomain command brings back 223 links, whereas the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool brings back 129 links to the domain name. Point being, I know "yisha" isn't a competitive term, but that has little to do with ranking number one in a matter of months at Google.

• Google # 1: http://www.google.com/search?q=yisha
  
• Yahoo! # 8: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=yisha
  
• Ask # 2: http://www.ask.com/web?q=yisha
  
• MSN # 1: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=yisha

Shows you what a creative idea can do for ones search rankings.

On a related note; the engagement party is this weekend.

Have a good weekend all!

Last year we had creative logos from all Google, Yahoo and Ask - oh lets not forget gmail's logo. We even had a Turkey Day Google Backlink Update! Today, on Thanksgiving 2005, we have some new logos to share with you.

We have a logo from Yahoo! which links to the Yahoo! Holiday Guide 2005.

We have a logo from Ask Jeeves, which links to one of those nice smart answers on Thanksgiving. I also decided to post a thread on Ask's Turkey day logo at SEW Forums.

We do not yet have an official Google Holiday logo for Thanksgiving yet. But Gmail does have a logo for the day.

Update: Google uploaded it's Thanksgiving logo, which links to a search on thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving All!

Update: Ask will continue with their PPC product, they have no desire to discontinue it. Barry talked to Ask and here is there offical response from Patrick Crisp:

Like we did on Ask.com to improve the search experience, we are reducing the number of ads above our organic search results on the Ask.co.uk site. On Ask.co.uk, we are eliminating our Branded Response and the Answer Link products, showing only PPC listings as we do on Ask.com. Similar moves in the U.S. have resulted in an all-time high retention rate. As it does today, Ask.co.uk will continue to show Google Listings.

Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings PPC product is going very well in the U.S., and we are focused on continuing to grow AJSL here before we expand internationally. While we believe the reduction in ad products will be great for our users, it has impacted our direct sales force only in the United Kingdom. We believe this will make Ask.co.uk an even stronger platform for advertisers to reach customers.

I do have to admit this is a pretty strange rumor, being that Ask just recently launched their PPC product back in August. Threadwatch reports a rumor/speculation from a source that says that Ask may discontinue there PPC program and has already started letting their sales team go.

So why would Ask want to discontinue there PPC program? One answer comes to mind, they are not discontinuing it in the US, but only in the UK. The other thought is that advertisers are not willing to pay a premium to be listed on Ask. Buying direct isn't all that it's crack up to be for advertisers possibly. I admit I have enjoyed testing out the program from the beginning but slowly got discouraged as CPC rates rose from affordable levels to those consistent with hyper competitive keywords in Google Adwords. I have scaled back my own campaign as it was no longer a good deal. Conversions were near or at levels from what I saw with Adwords. So why pay more when I could get an all in one solution buy using Adwords?

Then again, this is just pure speculation with no base for fact. It could just be a really misinformed source that let the news slip or the real deal? Barry reported back in August about the Ask Sponsered Listing program, which said that Ask was dropping some of their PPC ads because, "IAC understood organic results was the way to go, they have studies that show more users come back when they use the ask organic results. And they know the PPC ads were keeping users away." However, as "Google became a larger part of Ask's business, they had to keep adding more ppc ads." So whats a butler to do?

There are no forum threads I could find but here is some discussion about Ask Sponsored Listings on the forum currently - Digitalpoint - WMW - Cre8asite Forums

It has been a while since I chatted about Ask Jeeves. Well last night they posted a new blog entry over at the Ask Jeeves blog named New AJDS Updates. In that entry they list out a list of changes made to the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search application.

-- Folder Indexing Preferences (choose what to index!)

-- Improved PDF indexing

-- Email attachment name indexing

-- Improved Zip file indexing

-- Enhanced previews for Office files

-- Indexing of iTunes metadata (search by title, artist, album, genre, and year)

-- Search term highlighting

-- Full Outlook Express support

-- Pause indexing (with new animated indexing graphic)

-- Improved stability overall

-- New homepage with most recently viewed files

-- Improved status callouts

-- Writely document search (yes, Web-based word processing search...in a desktop search tool!)

And they hint to APIs coming soon at the end, "rest assured they are on the roadmap."

I started a thread at Cre8asite Forum and at Search Engine Watch Forum.

Ask Jeeves is calling them tasty cheats, because not only can Ask tell you Final Fantasy PS2 Cheats but also tell you some turkey recipes for one of my favorite holidays.

We've partnered with AllRecipes.com in order to provide a powerful Smart Search experience that serves up some of their most popular & highest rated recipes and delivers them right to your fingertips. In fact, I already started doing dry runs of a holiday meal in order to get over my fear of entertaining dinner guests:

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Based on an Ask Jeeves blog posting named Deep Thoughts at Web 2.0, where Jim Lanzone writes up some detailed figures on Bloglines and its subscriber base.

Adrian at Cre8asite posted a thread summarizing some of those stats;

In Bloglines they have a pretty decent 1.3 million feeds with at least subscriber. I guess that says as much about Bloglines popularity as much anything, it owuld be interesting to compare that with similar stats from other RSS Reader services. But considering how many blogs there are meant to be, let alone all the other types of site now using feeds for news and things, that seems a relatively low number. And Jim says in the post, they kind of thought, is that all?

And then to show that less than 40,000 feeds had more than 20 subscribers shows the drop off in usage. That's less than 3% of the feeds with at least 1 subscriber also having more than 20.

I also thought the 'Search Index' section was quite interesting. Despite having billions of indexed pages, 6million cover half of all clicked on results. And looking at the graph, 250million cover 90%.

Makes for some good RSS/Blog/Bloglines discussion.

I just wanted to let all you know, that I am now engaged to be married to my beautiful girlfriend, Yisha.

Why am I posting this here, at a search blog? Well, because of the way I did it.

I proposed via Ask Jeeves. I brought Yisha to my office, ask her to search on her name. While she was doing that I kneeled behind her with the ring and flowers. She typed in her name into Ask Jeeves, full name, and up came a special Smart Answer (thanks to Jim Lanzone and team) with the proposal.

I don't have much time to explain it, so go to the idea page for more information.

Also try rustybrick engagement for some other smart searches.

Thanks again to Jim Lanzone, Scott Grieder, Steve Orr, Daniel Read, and the whole Ask Jeeves team!

GeoTrust, probably the second most popular online security brand on the net, launched a new search service today named TrustWatch. Ask Jeeves wrote a blog entry named “Trust, But Verify" to symbolize the message behind the new search service.

Powered by Ask Jeeves algorithmic search technology, the new service is designed to combat web-based fraud, identity theft and phishing scams. Users simply type queries into the search box at www.trustwatch.com and view easily understood green, yellow and red verification symbols beside each search result that represent the web site's trustworthiness rating.

For example, users wanting to donate money for tsunami relief can type "Tsunami Relief Organizations" directly into the TrustWatch search box. The Ask Jeeves search engine will return relevant search results based on each site's authority on that specific topic, including redcross.org, usaid.gov, directrelief.org and americares.org. Each result will also appear with the TrustWatch rating prominently displayed, so users can quickly select trustworthy sites and donate with confidence.

So I decided to give it a spin, let me take you through it. Searched on web site design services and the first result was http://www.hwg.org/, which was not verified. So I clicked on the little yellow light with a question mark (verification icons explained here) and received this pop up window.

The next two top tabs look like, this and this respectively. To me, this seems pretty easy to spam.

Forum thread started at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Back in May 2005 we heard the rumors about Ask being renamed but today word comes from TheStreet.com article named Diller Sacks the Butler.

Jeeves is out of a job.

IAC/InterActiveCorp. is dropping the butler who doubles as the mascot of its recently acquired Ask Jeeves online search business.

I guess we no longer need to play the name guessing game and just try to play the 'when will it happen" game.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & Cre8asite Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Jeeves is sporting a new pirate costume this morning, in respect for something called Talk Like A Pirate Day. I would have never heard of the special day, if it wasn't for Jeeves.

What I find humorous is that if you do a search on yar at Ask, it brings up the same Smart Search result.

Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday invented in 1995 by two Americans who proclaimed September 19 as the day when everyone should talk like pirates. Instead of "hello," an observer of this holiday may greet acquaintances with "Ahoy, me hearties,” for example. Yar

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Perform a search at Ask Jeeves on the keyword phrase ipod and you'll notice an old smart answers feature that comes up, customer ratings & compare prices. This is how it was done in the past, partnering with pricegrabber.com. It works well, but what about those more generic searches?

Based on last nights Ask Jeeves's Blog posting named Compare. Contrast. Repeat. Ask has integrated Gifts.com, an IAC property, into http://ask.gifts.com/ and Smart Answers.

The example given at the AJ blog is a search on gifts, which brings up a more generic smart answer taking you to the ask.gifts.com category landing pages.

Forum Coverage, I posted at Cre8asite Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

I call this thread, the funny thread of the week. A WebmasterWorld thread named Google Penalizes for being #1 is both funny but at the same time you can learn a lot from it. First let me quote the initial post which has been picked apart by the members.

Google Penalizes for being #1! Yes, it's true! Once you are in the #1 Position google WILL NOT let you get any higher, but WILL allow you fall - often drastically! I have seen this time and time again.

Lesson #1: Risks :: If you have a number one ranking for a very visible query, then you better have received that ranking 100% naturally or you will lose it. We all know Google, Yahoo!, etc. will manually make hand adjustments to very popular search queries. It just makes practical sense for them to do this. So if you do have a number one ranking and you have an inkling that you should not (even the slightest), do not expect it to last.

Lesson #2: Ranking Higher :: One can make out from the quote above that this member is upset that he/she can not get his/her ranking higher then the number one organic result. Of course, the member does not mean that, but let's assume he/she did. There are several ways to get a listing above the #1 organic result in Google. You can go the AdWords route and hope that Google inserts sponsored results above the organic results (they do very often). You can also try to get into Google News, Google Images, Google Definitions, Google etc... These are all vertical searches that are often placed above the natural listings and can you give nice visibility. Try a search for google on Google and see the news items at the top.

Lesson #3: All Fun :: Have fun with the thread, enjoy it and don't get upset. Honestly, I have number one rankings, I do not deserve in some obscure engines. I do not expect them to last. I am having fun with it now and won't go to a forum to express my deep inner feelings after they are lost.

Looks like SEW forums just got another search engine rep to add to their belts. Promoted from a discussion on whether or not Ask Jeeves would employ the ability for agencies to manage all their client account under one roof. Mike McGrath, with the Sponsored Listings Client Services posted today that indeed their is the ability for SEM agencies to manage all their client account under the same roof. He says:

"The new automated system does allow advertisers or agencies to link together an unlimited number of accounts, each with an unlimited number of campaigns. To set this up, go to the “Manage Account Access” page for your account. Then, input the account name (i.e. email address) in the “Give User Access to this Account Address” and choose the access level (Read, Read and Modify, etc.). "

Go to know, and very nice. I hope Mike sticks around and answer other questions from members. Will be a great resource to have as people develop questions. Some of the stuff they have, in the program that is not mentioned thoroughly and or either not in the help file in detail so having a rep is a good place to start.

Mike also mentions that if you are a not spending more than $5000/month then you are confined to the email service for your questions at listingssupport@askjeeves.com. If you are spending over $5000 a month then you can use the AJSL Managed Account program and actually talk to a real person.

In my personal opinion I really don't see Ask Jeeves sponsored listings doing better than any of the other main PPC providers out there. I have been using the programs since they started about 2 weeks ago, and I keep asking myself when I use the program, why they didn't do anything to spice it up, do something innovative, different, or creative so that they stand apart and users can identify the value in what they are trying to do.

At the last SES conference in San Jose, on the evening forums on the 3rd day was an Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan. We didn't blog on this, but it was a very good sessions for the fact that people finally got a chance to voice their opinions on what they wanted to see. People were primarily pissed at Google. It was the first time since I started this SEO stuff soo soo long ago that I have actually see people turn on Google. They were tired of the canned responses and lack of desire to implement better functions in the Adwords accounts when all along they could just do it very easily. As someone once told me, their is "great money in inefficency".

Some of the primary concerns people had related to very simple things that could be fixed easily, other not so much. But the lack of response on behalf of Google was being to wear people thin. Some of the things from my notes that concerned them the most:

• Better tools!


• Better tools to track success


• What affects ranking...


• Better fraudulent click tracking... tell them what and where its happening


• Better inferface, simplier


• More responsive to customer problems


• Better phone support and better reps


• Support for better tools for agencies


• Integration of 3rd party management tools, API


• Educate the editors


• ...and finally Better Tools!

While there is more, that touches on some of it. People need better tools was the consensus from that session I attended. When it came down to it, tools were important to people, and it was simple stuff like having a tool to schedule when and when not the campaign could run. Currently you can't edit this, its either on or off.

So the jist of my speal here is to identify Ask could have and should have come in with better functionality and some neat features. They could have easily attracted advertisers with ease being that they could say "Hey look, we did what they wouldn't!", and then again maybe they will in the future. Guess we'll see.

Continue discussion on ASK at SEW Forums

Ask Jeeves, one of the most innovative search engines out there, just announced that they have So Many Smart Answers, So Little Time. In that Ask Jeeves blog entry, they list tons of example Smart Answer searches. Gary Price over at the SEW Blog summarizes the new features in categories.

So, what's new from AJ today? Here's a list of the new Smart Answers. Each is linked to an example.

• World Nations: Quick Facts
Not only facts from the CIA World Factbook listed on the results page but also direct links to other sources. We like!
• US States: Quick Facts
Note: Jeeves also offers something similar for major cities in the US.
• Mammals
• Popular TV Shows information
Fun! In many cases you'll also find direct links to episode guides.
• Famous People: Music profiles
• Video Games: All major titles plus platform
• NASCAR: Races & Drivers
• ISBN Search
Book info and link to comparison price engine.
• Periodic Table of Elements
• US Area Code lookup
• Planets: Quick Facts

I posted a thread on this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There has been lots of commotion about Ask Jeeves and the PPC Ads over the past year or so. We all know they started to do direct ads themselves, to supplement Google Ads. A Search Engine Watch Forum post reveals that you are beginning to show these ads in the Sponsored Results area. The image below shows the URLs of when I mouse over the Dell link (top URL) versus when I mouse over Circuit City link (bottom). The Dell link shows an Ask Jeeves url, whereas the Circuit City link shows a Google url for the search term DVD (and many others).

I did very few search, but most Ask Jeeves ads seem to be Dell sponsored.

Via, Gary Price at Search Engine Watch Blog, "To honor the birth of Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry, Mr. Jeeves "beams up" a special logo today."

On the homepage of www.ask.com you will see a special logo in honor of Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry. "Gene Roddenberry was the man behind the ultra-successful Star Trek franchise, the creator and producer of the original television series (1966-69). A combat veteran of World War II, Roddenberry moved to Los Angeles to work as a writer for television in the 1950s."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There are many forum posts asking what people have experienced with the newly released Ask Jeeves Paid Listing Program. Finally, someone posted some metrics on the program. The post is at WebmasterWorld and reads;

I have been live since monday as well, and I am quite happy with the results. It is currently 4.1% of my traffic and 4.3% of convertions. I just wish they had more users/traffic.

I'll keep watching and reporting back findings.

The other day, by way of example, I was giving Google a hard time. Then after seeing if they made any changes to the SERPs based on that post, which they did, I noticed MSN's bad behavior.

Yesterday, I noticed that MSN indexed a link to an Ask Jeeves SERPs page. For example, see a search at MSN on big blue pineapple chair and then scroll down to the 3rd result. You should see.

Ok, so they didn't write a piece of code to block results from Ask's SERPs page. But then I look again today, to take some screen captures and noticed that MSN's own SERPs are included in MSN's index.

And I am giving Yahoo! a hard time about which pages to index, and about index size.

I started a thread on the topic at Search Engine Watch Forums where a member adds that MSN has not only indexed that SERP but about 60,000 other Ask Jeeves search results pages. So then I decided to check the other search engines. Over 70,000,000 of its own engine, but it seems to be staying off Google & Yahoo for the most part.

Looks like the folks at Ask Jeeves are getting a free small focus group on the name change over at Search Engine Watch Forums. The thread is named Ask Jeeves Name Guessing Game and asks the members which name they think Ask Jeeves will choose in the long run.

This is all brought up from a past article where Diller hinted to Ask Jeeves to be Renamed to Ask and then the recent Keynote by Steve Berkowitz at SES this past week.

My opinion, the name with be changed to Ask.

Gary Price at Search Engine Watch pointed me to this Financial Times article named IAC to revamp Ask Jeeves website. Basically, what is happening are:

(1) Ask Jeeves search engine to show fewer paid links
(2) Increase the amount of direct advertising
(3) Improve the search function in consumer categories such as concert tickets.

Number one in that list is huge. I had the privilege to speak with Jim Lanzone of Ask Jeeves about this. First he told me that they will be sponsoring the party Monday night at SES, and the band that was in the movie Old School will be playing. Then we got into the convo about this topic. Here are some of my notes...

- Ask always wanted to drop most of the ads. It hurt him and the company to see Ask's name get trashed in forums due to those ads. (not direct quotes)
- They had lots of obligations to stake-holders (mostly stockholders) and simply couldn't drop a major source of revenue.
- During this time, they developed lots of innovative products.
- But they knew they needed to balance the ads and organic results.
- When Barry (IAC) came on board, Barry wanted to focus on this product (ask) long term
- IAC understood organic results was the way to go, they have studies that show more users come back when they use the ask organic results. And they know the PPC ads were keeping users away.
- This is a no brainer, and they know in the long term it will pay off.
- In 2002, Ask was one of the first to drop banner ads
- But as Google became a larger part of Ask's business, they had to keep adding more ppc ads.

And now we are here, IAC, no more overwhelming ads, starting tomorrow!

Forum coverage:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- WebmasterWorld
- Cre8asite Forums

If you didn't believe the rumors that Ask would start a PPC engine, you can believe the official associate press. It is very very true. And I am personally very excited to see what Ask Jeeves will be bringing to the table to innovate this market space. I was a bit disturbed by Agency.com's Chris Bowler being quoted as saying, "Ask Jeeves isn't presenting anything new: it's a copycat service," I am sure he was taken out of context. I believe it is just the opposite.

I started some threads on this topic at:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- Cre8asite Forums
- WebmasterWorld

This is now live at http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com/

Ask Jeeves just deployed MyJeeves 1.2: Tagging Solution for Virtual Folders but it does not offer the community aspect focus that Yahoo! has done so nicely with MyWeb 2.0.

I call asks version, self-tagging, because it doesn't allow you to view your "communities" tags. For example, about a week ago, I was surfing through my community tags at Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 and found a tag named blogsiread. After clicking through, I noticed this tag was used often by Jeff Weiner (Yahoo! Senior VP). I was upset to learn that this site was not listed within the tag. So I decided to go over to Yahoo! 360, which I use almost every day now, to get Jeff Weiner's attention.

You see, Jeff Weiner is part of my community, in fact, he is a direct link in my community (not a friend of a friend). So I knew if I blogged about it at Yahoo! 360 he would see it, so I wrote a Y! 360 blog entry named Jeff Weiner...Why Am I Not on blogsiread? and posted his image. Guess, what? It got his attention. A few hours later Jeff Weiner left a comment stating;

Page Search Engine Roundtable ::: The Pulse Of The Search Marketing Community

http://www.seroundtable.com/
My Details
Saved 1 minute ago - Edit - Email
Note: rusty, never really thought of search engine roundtble as a blog so much as a search engine trade resource. read your stuff quite a bit (and have saved, tagged and shared rusty search among other docs you've published). now duly tagged.
Tags: blogsiread, rustybrick
Access: Everyone
See similar pages saved by me

Basically, he copied and pasted the addition of this site in that tag with a very nice note. I also like to think of this site as "a search engine trade resource" and not a blog. :)

Back to the community aspect. Do you see how this tagging thing is working at Yahoo! versus Ask Jeeves. Don't get me wrong, Ask Jeeves did comment that they might be going in that direction, but not just yet.

In the long term, we intend to provide a smoother "upgrade path" by suggesting the gradual adoption of tagging. As users become more familiar with the process, they�ll be able to explore the collective corpus of information through related tags or their social network, and further refine their taxonomy in some kind of virtuous circle.

I also left out the whole component on how this can affect one's rankings...

Today, Ask Jeeves announced an upgrade to MyJeeves named MyJeeves 1.2. The two main differences are (1) Tagging and (2) Photo Management. The big one obviously is the tagging component.

Read how they explained the use of tagging in MyJeeves 1.2:

The first impulse was to blur the line between foldering and tagging by merging them into topics. This turned out to be too confusing for most people. The second scenario was to overlay tagging on top of foldering, resulting in "virtual folders". This is the approach Longhorn seems to be taking - sorry, I meant Vista...which sounds far less intimidating - and dagnabit if it didn't work. So there you have it: "tags as virtual folders" is what we just launched with MyJeeves 1.2.

"Virtual folders", in reality, that is what it is.

I have started threads about this at Cre8asite Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Tagging has been around for a while now, not sure why they blogged about it today. Gary notes that he blogged about Ask Jeeves adding tagging on April 11, 2005.

Danny Sullivan reported that New Ask Jeeves Paid Listings Program Said To Come August 1, based on ThreadWatch spotting this AdRants entry. In addition, Danny saw that MediaPost has a thing or two on the rumor.

Remember about a week ago we posted an entry named Would Ask Dare Drop Google AdWords in 2007? Well, possibly they will do it within two weeks and not wait for 2007.

Reportedly, Ask Jeeves' paid search will look similar to Google's system. It primarily will be based on keyword bidding, but with some measure of relevance, such as click-through rates, factored into the advertiser's ultimate cost. The minimum bid will reportedly start at 5 cents. Ask Jeeves' sponsored listings likely will co-exist with Google's, at least for the time being. Google's contract to power sponsored listings on Ask Jeeves doesn't expire until 2007.

Forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Cre8asite Forum thread named Ask Jeeves doesnt seem to be working right! reports what seems to be a session issue. Basically, you do a search on any keyword, try search engine at ask.co.uk and then you click the next page link. The results should pretty much mimic the first page results. I have tested this myself and it seems to be true.

One interesting distinction is that the second result, www.ultraseek.com, shows a different title on the first page, versus the second page. Although the first X listing are from the same URL.

One thread, one post, on July 23rd, no responses yet, at WebmasterWorld. How many of you SEOs watch Ask Jeeves that closely, but one member reports going "from around 420 pages to 790" indexed by Ask Jeeves.

Sugarrae started a thread at WebmasterWorld about the news that AJ Interactive was just launched.

Seems they are offering email marketing, search results marketing (on AJ and the various properties they own) and what appears to be a "higher level" contextual advertising program. I say higher level based on the "traffic options" listed on the publisher application.

From the thread, it seems many are not interested.

So much for the catchy title... Gary Price blogged Ask Jeeves: Barry Diller Ponders Leaving Google Ad Network. Gary recaps an article, "Diller does tell Liedtke that he's considering leaving the Google ad network and forming an his own network when AJ's contract with Google expires in 2007."

Gary, as well as other analysts, believe that Barry Diller said this to be able to negotiate a better contract with Google when this one expires. But it makes you think, would Ask Jeeves Dare to Drop AdWords in 2007? That is the name of a thread I just started over at Search Engine Watch, participate, if you will.

Almost all Webmasters have experienced the Teoma Crawler that crawls too much. What I mean by too much, is that the bandwidth usage of Ask Jeeves sometimes can spike uncontrollably. There are threads all over the place about this. The most recent thread I found is at DigitalPoint forums and is named Ask Jeeves hitting thousands of pages on a 12 page site...

So what can you do? Here are just a few?

(1) Exclude the image directories from these crawlers. Unless you want to rank well for image searches, there is no real reason to have the spiders crawl your large images.

(2) The Teoma crawler supports the Crawl-Delay, you can set a crawl delay for that spider. More information at Teoma Tech Information page.

(3) Then of course you can do the caching stuff and compression stuff on the server side.

Ask Jeeves is the one major search engine engine to post a special logo for Canada Day. Since a bit over 2% of our readers are from Canada (I am sure its more but the stats can't be a 100%), I thought I note this.

The Smart Answer for Canada Day is very useful. A guy like me who knows very little about things outside of New York, can easily become very cultured in a matter of minutes. No I am not proud, I blame the education department of the state of New York.

On June 20, 1868, a proclamation signed by the Governor General, Lord Monck, called upon all Her Majesty's loving subjects throughout Canada to join in the celebration of the anniversary of the formation of the union of the British North America provinces in a federation under the name of Canada on July 1st.

The bad press doesn't stop for Ask Jeeves and this MySearch toolbar. If you run a PC and use IE, you most likely found this MySearch Toolbar installed on it without knowing you installed it. Does that tick you off? I bet it does. A recent article over at MSNBC says "Ask Jeeves didn't ask before installing a search tool on millions of Web browsers. Now investors are asking questions." They use Ben Edelman, who was instrumental in the WhenU Cloaking case (sorry those comments were lost in a server crash). Danny Sullivan puts everything into perspective in his blog entry More Questions On Adware & Search Ad Distribution.

There is forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

When I first asked Jim Lanzone to answer some questions for Cre8asite, I did not think it would be an ongoing thing. But he, as well as the Ask Jeeves team, has been very responsive to the questions the Cre8asite members have been posting. Also, note how Jim has changed his avatar from Bill Gates to this character. :)

I wonder what we can expect tomorrow.

Jim's new posts can be found here and here. Also, Rahul Lahiri, Jim's technical side, has been answering some questions.

Some good quotes:

Remember we have a unique search technology, so what works with GYM will not necessarily work with Ask. And we do not keep pages in our index simply for the sake of size. So keep at it, I'm sure we'll get you in there.

More? [referring to unique "AJ" features] Beyond Teoma, we've been at the forefront with so many products, from Smart Answers to Binoculars to MyJeeves to Zoom and Web Answers this past week. We even announced Desktop search first. I'm dyin' here.

First the blog comment spam one [referring to the nofollow link attribute tag announced by Google and Yahoo and MSN]. We are not in any rush to implement support for this one. Due to the fundamental difference of the Teoma technology from PageRank and PageRank-like technologies, we do not have the same vulnerability to this type of spam.

Another result of the need for simplicity has been a de-emphasis on the personification of the butler over the years.

So keep checking this thread for more Ask Jeeves goodies. Good, honest, wholesome feedback directly from a search engine executive.

On Friday I informed you of Ask's VP, Jim Lanzone, Live Q&A Session taking place over at Cre8asite Forums. Many of the members and even some new registrants signed on to take advantage of this opportunity. Jim Lanzone, Senior VP over at Ask Jeeves, posted a long but detailed response to member questions. In addition, he did it with some humor by uploading an Avatar of himself, but using Bill Gates's photo.

My favorite quote:

We don�t want to spaz out and just turn out product after product just to get headlines, nor do we want to offer something that isn�t an improvement over the status quo (e.g., email just for the sake of it).

Rahul, the Ask Jeeves techie, is suppose to stop by to answer some of the more technical questions. I am not sure if Jim can stop by again soon, but he might.

If you visit the Ask Jeeves Home Page you will see a silhouette of the butler blowing a trumpet. Clicking on that silhouette will take you to an Ask Jeeves search results page for Memorial Day.

I assume Google is too busy working on the PR thing?

Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President, Search Properties of Ask Jeeves, Inc. has agreed to conduct a live question and answer session at Cre8asite Forums. I have named this thread Live Q&A Session with Jim Lanzone, VP of Ask Jeeves.

Jim has promised me to stop by starting Sunday to review and answer questions posted by Cre8asite Forum members. This is a great opportunity to find out what is going on at Ask Jeeves.

The blogs and the news sites have been buzzing about the recent news that Ask Jeeves is to provide the PPC ads for the new BitTorrent search engine.

The controversy comes in, when you look at what BitTorrent does for a living. Basically, BitTorrent uses peer-to-peer technology to "give you the same freedom to publish previously enjoyed by only a select few with special equipment and lots of money." Or BitTorrent, also, allows you to easily download the latest Star Wars movie.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named AskJeeves in Ad Distribution Partnership with BitTorrent, asks the question...Does Ask Jeeves want to serve up sponsored ads for searches on keyword phrases like pirated star wars movie, software serial numbers and so on? As you can imagine, this goes to the heart of many freedom of speech types.

The question at heart is, is this good for the Ask Jeeves brand?

News comes way that Ask has announced two new very useful features named Zoom and Web Answers. John Batelle has a quick & easy write up on those features but I will try to make it even quicker for you below. Chris Sherman & Gary Price has a more detailed write up at SEW.

Zoom: Search Ask for the beatles and look at the right side of the page. "Narrow Your Search", "Expand Your Search" and "Related Names" make up the zoom feature.

Web Answer: Search Ask for deadliest snake and see [Web Answer] in red. You can then click through to the three other Web answers to see 3 groups of answers.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch Forums and I have updated the Ask Jeeves SEM Time Line of Events at Cre8asite Forums.

Side note: Notice how I titled this enter "Ask" versus "Ask Jeeves", but what is weird, Jeeves9000 made a surprise appearance last night.

Just rumors at this point, but there is speculation that Ask Jeeves is to be renamed to simply "Ask.com" or "Ask". Gary Price over at the Search Engine Watch Blog posted an entry named Diller: Ask Jeeves Might Get New Name. In there, he quotes Barry Diller as saying; "Might be one of those words [Ask or Jeeves] without the other," Diller answered, adding that the final decision on AskJeeves' new name isn't "finalized."

Gary rationalizes that ""Jeeves" by itself would be no better than what they have now." So the assumption is that the name will be Ask.com. Does the butler give Ask Jeeves a bad rep?

I have posted a thread for discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

SearchViews blog posted an entry last night named 5 Questions with Jim Lanzone, Senior VP of Search Properties, Ask Jeeves. As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Ask Jeeves and Jim Lanzone. He asks Jim in question number 5, if Ask will be pursuing a PPC engine to compete with Google, Yahoo and soon to be MSN. Of course, he said he could not discuss it. He did however say, "But that doesn't mean we'll rely 100% on any one revenue source in the future. Today, about 30% of our ad revenue is generated by our internal products and sales force, and we believe there's a lot we can do ourselves in this space over time."

This morning, or last night, Netimperative reported that Jeeves buys Excite Europe, however, it seems like the story was pulled (at least it is currently not loading anymore, it was 10 minutes ago).

Luckily, there is forum discussion on the topic. First forum to post something on the topic was WebmasterWorld. I was then responsible for the next two forum posts at Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Also, you can find the Press Release at PR News Wire.

Rumor is that it cost 6.1 million euros.

Keep snagging small pieces of the pie, Jeeves.

Update: Gary Price writes Ask Buys Excite Europe; To Share Excite.com With Infospace, "the company has agreed in a "comprehensive settlement of litigation" with InfoSpace to share marketing costs and revenue from the Excite.com Web search function."

It has been a while since I last wrote about Ask Jeeves, April 28th, to be exact. Jim Lanzone and Mark Fletcher (Bloglines) went over to Japan to take care of Ask Jeeves Japan business. Mark Fletcher blogged about it at his blog wingedpig.com, he posted a link to the report of the trip in both Japanese and a poor translated English version, I personally like the picture.

So what is with the title of this entry? "Deep Purple", comes from the band who sings a song named Woman from Tokyo, but I do not believe they are in Tokyo at the moment. Anyway...

With the release of Tiger, Ask Jeeves released a Dashboard Widget named Immediate Answer and they blogged about it under the name of Easy Tiger. Maybe I missed it but I am surprised they didn't mention the more useful (in my opinion) Bloglines Notifier Widget.

Also, it is true. Ask Jeeves and the people that work at the company care a ton. They are obviously less crazed with requests compared to Google and Yahoo! but based on my interactions with them. They have been going far and beyond where they need to go to make a difference. I wish I can give specifics.

Gary Price does it again, he posted a blog entry named Ask Jeeves Reports Earnings; CEO Comments on Improving User Experience By Reducing Number of Ads on Results Pages, which encouraged me to post a thread at both Cre8asite Forums as well as Search Engine Watch Forums. Basically, Ask Jeeves is publicly saying that they can and will reduce the number of ads shown in the SERPs because they feel that it will better improve user experience. I know the folks at Ask Jeeves have been feeling this way for a while now, but since Google Ads bring in a whopping 70% of their ad revenue, to drop them off, would be huge.

Ask Jeeves CEO is quoted in this article as saying:

Berkowitz said that, in a bid to improve the user experience with the search engine, the company began to implement a program in early April to reduce by 31% the number of ads it shows at the top of its results pages. The company's tests show that a smaller number of ads boosts the frequency with which people use the site and aids user retention. As such, Jeeves expects the change to help lift query volumes and ad revenue later in the year.

Ask Jeeves believe that by reducing the number of PPC ads, user experience will improve. When that happens, more repeat visitors, more new visitors, less ads per user but more ad impressions overall, more clicks, more money. At least, that is the hope. Major move!

Creative logos to celebrate Earth Day by creative search engines. Ask Jeeve's Logo is a link that takes you to Ask Jeeves Search Results for Earth Day. Google, does not link their image, at least not as this point in time.

Forum discussion on the Google Earth Day logo at WebmasterWorld and I started a thread at Cre8asite Forums on the Ask Jeeves Earth Day Logo.

Just wanted to point you folks to a sticky thread I have been working up for Cre8asite's new Ask Jeeves forum, for about two weeks now. I named it the Ask Jeeves SEM Time Line of Events.

Towards the end of the timeline you see more of my unique events. I have only been really following them for a little bit more then two years. I'll keep updating that thread when things change. Also, I am waiting on some more goodies from Ask Jeeves for that thread, so we will see.

Ask Jeeves posted a blog entry named "Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me". Yes, they are 8 years old. But, like us, they posted the information one day too late.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Ask Jeeves!

Ask Jeeves is going global with http://es.ask.com/. The official release can be found at Yahoo! News under the name Ask Jeeves, Inc. Launches Ask Jeeves Espana. I was hoping to find Jeeves dressed up in the local garb, but he was not.

Forum thread at Cre8asite, the first new Ask Jeeves thread in the new Ask Jeeves forum over at Cre8asite.

Update: Jeeves blogs on �Jeeves habla espa�ol!.

In good spirit of April Fools, Ask Jeeves wrote a blog entry named The Future of Search Arrives: Introducing The Jeeves9000 (BETA) where they joke about a futuristic Jeeves robot to help you with your daily tasks. There are three videos at the site you must watch, the middle one talks about their subject specific stuff, the last one you can see Jim Lanzone from Ask Jeeves get whacked by Jeeves9000 (priceless). I started a thread on this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

But, I found last night, a Jeeves1000 for sale. And this is really no april fools joke. I found the Jeeves1000 at eBay and its currently on bid with 7 days 2 hours remaining. I am really not kidding and I even started a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I left out these two videos, Intro Movie, note the "beta" on the back of the head. And Integration Movie, note Mark Fletcher (CEO of Bloglines, acquired by Ask Jeeves recently) being strangled by Jeeves9000. Too funny.

This morning I revieved a press release from Ask Jeeves named "Bloglines is First to Go Beyond the Blog With Unique-to-Me Info Updates" with a subtitle "New FedEx, UPS and U.S. Postal Service Package Tracking Lands in the Bloglines Universal Inbox." Keeps reminding me that this is the future, at least for the next 2 years or so. RSS will power us, power the way we use the Web. Yahoo! knows it, Ask Jeeves knows it, MSN knows it, they all know it.

In the release it says; "Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world's largest parcel shipping companies-FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service-within their Bloglines MyFeeds page."

It also reads, "In addition to blog text updates and RSS news feeds, the Bloglines Universal Inbox can track and aggregate many types of web and email based data that helps people stay well informed."

An other search engine that went out of its way for Easter is Ask Jeeves.

The Butler has his basket:

But even more so, when you search on Easter Eggs you get those smart answers. Want "Easter Crafts and Activities", you got it. Want some great Easter Egg Pictures, you got it.

A new thread is just getting started over at Cre8asite Forums named How to get answers to questions. In that thread, moderator, Barry Weldford, asks what search engines are out there to give you answers to specific questions? He brings up the name of one such engine, named BrainBoost, which works well.

I then brought in Ask Jeeves, which is known for its question and answer's ability. The famous example is searching on When was Michael Jordan drafted?, which gives you one of those "Smart Search" features that Ask is so well known for.

So I decided to compare the two. Whereas, Ask Jeeves served up that answer in a nice little box, BrainBoost gave the correct answer as well, but not in a nice little box. I went on to try out other questions:

Q: When was Michael Jordan drafted?
A: Ask Jeeves got it right, no box this time. But look at those nice "Related Topics" on the right.
BrainBoost got it right as well.

Q: Who was the 27th president of the united states?
A: Jeeves again with class.
BrainBoost right again.

Overall, Jeeves has a nicer interface and seems a lot quicker in returning results. Other engines will give you the results, but not boxed in like Jeeves. Does it matter, I believe so.

Eric Scheske from Crux Magazine, a normal Internet searcher, wrote up an entry complaining about a particular search experience. Basically he searched on the question (Ask answers questions) What's the name of the famous black transvestite? and arrived at the "Your search is likely to return adult content" page. It looks something like:

View Large Image

Eric selected the last option "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." and then when the results came up, he clicked on the first link. This is his word by word description of what happened next:

Criminy! I was pounded with homosexual porn. I quickly clicked the "Back Button," and my screen was filled with more porn. I tried to close the whole internet application, and another screen of porn popped up---with about a half dozen pop up ads for porn. As my mouse flew around the screen clicking those upper-righthand X boxes, more would pop up. As it intensified, I felt like I was playing a video game�all the while afraid that one of the secretaries would walk in my office, see my screen filled with that stuff, screech in fright, and throw up her hands, thus launching a bundle of files against the wall. After thirty flurried seconds, I finally had all the porn boxes and sub-boxes closed.

At first, I felt the user was upset that such a site can get be displayed at Ask Jeeves when he selected the "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." One would expect the word "limit" would not allow for the first result to be so offensive to the user. And Jeeves received some bad press about serving porn to school kids. But the searcher was more upset with the actual pop ups and how it over took his computer. Maybe more of a reason for this user to download and use firefox. It goes to show you, that maybe, just maybe, users are blaming themselves for the bad results that show up in a search engine and not blaming the search engines.

This can be the break Ask Jeeves needs to really compete on a level playing field against Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The New York Times reports Ask Jeeves Inc. to Be Bought for $2 Billion and the Wall Street Journal reports Diller Nears Purchase of Ask Jeeves.

IAC/InterActiveCorp, the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc., the nation's fourth-largest search engine company, for about $1.9 billion, according to an executive involved in the negotiations. An announcement could be made as early as today.

Forum coverage currently at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

Update: SEO Chat Forums also.

Ask Jeeves's love for firefox, they created the Ask Jeeves Toolbar that only works with firefox. More information at the Ask Jeeves Blog, there are currently no forum threads on this topic.

Reported over at WebmasterWorld, Ask Jeeves had dropped many pages from well established sites, including Amazon, About.com and WebmasterWorld around the date of March 14th. Members reported that "Amazon.com has only got 700 odd pages listed, About.com only 13." Other members confirm these glitch saying "Agreed - down from 17k pages in Teoma to all of 37, with nothing having changed at this end!" And one member checks WebmasterWorld and reports "inurl: on Webmasterworld shows 6 pages!"

At this point, it seems that Jeeves is almost back to normal. It is actually funny reading the thread. If this happened with Google or Yahoo, forget about it.

Found this last night in some surfing around the Ask Jeeves site. I was looking for a particular URL that I had written down on a notepad at SES but can't seem to find presently. Still haven't found it, but I did find this. Thought it was fun and worth posting.

The archive in particular tells the story of Jeeves, the fearless servert powering Ask Jeeves Search. The Just Curious, comic collection was launched in the fall of 2001. It only made it to 3 comics before stopping. Not sure why. In any case, they are back for your enjoyment. Click on the comic to see the next one or click here.

Its nice to see that Ask Jeeves has some real people working over there. In the most recent entry at the Ask Jeeves blog named Confessions of a Backyard Orchardist a typical Web developer talks about her love for gardening. Nice touch in my opinion.

Of course, she throws in some nice plugs for the power of Ask's search technology, including the new enhancements to their image search.

An entry in the Ask Jeeves Blog named Gettin� the Picture, AJ Style discussed "time in our labs working on some new algorithms for delivering substantially better picture results than before."

No time for the forum coverage today, back to that on Monday.

Monday night, Ask Jeeves is hosting an invite only party in NYC. At this party, I am told, William Hung will be making a special appearance. There are now other rumors spreading that William Hung and Jeeves have a thing going on.

I have had the privilege to be in communication with Jim Lanzone at Ask Jeeves on a fairly regular basis. In some of our email exchanges, he discussed how Teoma is Ask Jeeves. I couldn't find the right word for it, so I used "cannibalize". Cannibalize is a harsh word, but the point is, Ask Jeeves is what people know. You and I might know Teoma, and respect it highly but its time for Ask and Teoma to "establish themselves as a single entity." Apostolos one of the founders of Teoma is the "#1 guy driving the engine", Jim told me. Jim continues by saying, without Ask Jeeves, Teoma would not be where it is today, so in a sense "Teoma is really just a theory" - Ask Jeeves is the engine.

For us, as individuals tied so closely to the technology and search, Teoma is something inspirational to us. Subject specific popularity, looking at the Web as communities, hubs, and authorities - and bring back results in milliseconds - Apostolos and Tao are geniuses. In Mike's interview, in an earlier entry I wrote today, Jim said to Mike; "It is all Ask Jeeves now. As Apostolos said earlier, it was only seven people and it's now into triple digits."

This is not a major issue for Ask to deal with outside of the SEM community. But Ask Jeeves does not want to hurt any feelings within this industry. Apostolos said "So there is indeed an appreciation of the simple fact that you were able to help us." He commends our industry for helping the search engines, and Ask Jeeves, work harder to get to where search should be. He said they are currently at stage three of ten and he is very excited to be part of Ask Jeeves and the future of search. Even though that might mean that Teoma is just a theory, a theory that will remain with Ask Jeeves, Apostolos and the SEM community for a really long time.

Again, I started a thread on this topic at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This new interview by Mike Grehan named Mike Grehan in conversation with... Apostolos Gerasoulis and Jim Lanzone is a must read. One little tidbit in there, is that Apostolos says Google no longer uses PageRank.

I am still reading the interview, so more comments later.

Late December I posted an entry here named Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could, where I aired out my concern with this search engine. The feedback was fabulous, and even Jim Lanzone (Senior Vice President) responded. Since then, Ask Jeeves has done a lot, including:

(1) TV Commercials
(2) Discussions about Open Sourcing Search
(3) Acquiring Bloglines
(4) Increased communication through Ask Jeeves Blog and Jeeves Coming Out

And now I see that they have removed the 7 of the 10 top sponsored results. They have place only 3 top sponsored results at the top and then is showing those juicy natural results. I stumbled across this while defending Ask Jeeves at an SEO Chat thread. So I tested out a few random searches, such as iPod and I only get 3 sponsored results as such

So these results seem to be looking fine. Also, check out a search on What is Ask Jeeves?. Those "Related Topics" are very humorous. :)

Lots of rumors about Ask Jeeves Joins Forces with Enhance to Offer Google AdWords Alternative, which turn out to be false.

Big no no on Enhance's part?.?.

Whenever i see this guy William Hung of American Idol, I laugh. Ask Jeeves, according the the AJ Blog, will be airing a commercial during tonight American Idol, that stars William Hung. To see the commercial click on the image below.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

There are some open source search engine initiatives taking place right now, one such example is Nutch. But what if, what if, Ask Jeeves, one of the "big four" took its engine and brought it to the open source community. I believe that is the topic of discussion at the Ask Jeeves blog, under the recent entry they wrote Mozilla's on Fire.

Many people are speculating an Ask Jeeves branded firefox browser. But that seems a bit too simple.

In the entry, Ask, discusses three things:

(1) Making Ask Jeeves desktop search an open source project.

(2) AJ-branded or co-branded Firefox browser.

(3) Technology called Octopus, which can benefit from the XUL platform.

They seem very interested and inspired by the open source community. I wonder, if a company like Ask Jeeves (publicly traded) can take such a step.

I opened this up for discussion at the Search Engine Watch Forums, I would love to hear what you have to say.

I finally made the switch from My Yahoo to Bloglines as my primary RSS reader. I have always set my browser's homepage to My Yahoo, but when I switched to Firefox from Safari, by default, the homepage was the page that loaded. My Yahoo loaded slightly on the slow side and I wanted a page that loaded quickly. I tested Bloglines and it seemed to load fast, it also shows entries I did not read by session.

I find it very useful, just wish I can add a keyword search for news feeds like Yahoo! allows for Yahoo! News. Who knows, it might be part of bloglines.

And if your using bloglines, feel free to:

A thread at WebmasterWorld has a post where a member said he spoke with an Ask Jeeves engineer and they told him that they might be adding a parameter to tell the teoma spiders how "hard" to crawl. Now this is supposedly different then the Yahoo! Crawl Delay where, "You can add a "Crawl-delay: xx" instruction, where "xx" is the minimum delay in seconds between successive crawler accesses. If the crawler rate is a problem for your server, you can set the delay up to 60 or 300 or whatever value is comfortable for your server."

I am trying to find out more information about the validity of this WebmasterWorld thread and what it really means. In the thread, the member said the Ask Jeeves representative said that this is not a Crawl Delay. At this point, I do not see how a hard crawl would be anything else but a time delay.

Great move by Ask Jeeves, in my opinion. Its just too bad they can't keep a secret. Everyone was bussing about the rumored purchase of bloglines by ask jeeves a few days before they officially announced it.

Here is a nice quote from the announcement:

"Bloglines is not only a market leader in feed aggregation and blog search, but it is truly one of the most useful and addictive services on the entire Web. We are excited about providing Bloglines with the resources to grow its service and help it reach a broader audience," said Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves' senior vice president of search properties. "Bloglines is a natural fit for our multi-brand portfolio, as we extend our information retrieval services to encompass the rapidly growing amount of dynamic content and information available in the blogosphere."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

I think, I might, switch from MyYahoo to Bloglines, it seems to be more popular based on my stats. I know one can not make judgments based on one site's rss feed. But its worth a try.

I left out the official word from the new Ask Jeeves Blog.

This is what is coming across the news wire, originally from Napsterization, who said this is supposed to be announced this coming Tuesday, Ask Jeeves will acquire Bloglines. I did scratch my head when the two links on the main navigation at the new Ask Jeeves Blog were to Bloglines. Also, if this is true, it would be great for Ask Jeeves. I believe that the majority of my RSS reader blog traffic comes from Bloglines, I do not know for sure if Bloglines is the most widely used RSS reader out there.

Josh from RepriseMedia posted this news at the Search Engine Watch Forums as well as at his blog named SearchViews. It also looks like the major news wires are picking it up, such as BusinessWeek.

As I mentioned in my comment in an earlier entry named Ask Jeeves Goes Blogging, JeevesGuy came out for the first time under his real name at WebmasterWorld under the name Kaushal Kurapati. I waited for the blog post at the new Ask Jeeves blog to say anything. Check out the entry named JeevesGuy Exposed!.

Good Work Ask Jeeves. It is great to hear from Teoma.

I was hoping that Mr. Jeeves would start a blog. It is really great to see they have joined the bandwagon. The Ask Jeeves blog looks really great, personally, I think they fit it into their Ask Jeeves brand better then the other three search blogs. The first and only entry as of now on the new blog is named Hey, Look What We Found: The Official Ask Jeeves Blog!, written by Erik Collier, Data Engineering Manager.

Hmm...and they look like they are using the nofollow tag in the comment links. I guess they are being kind to the other engines that have link spam issues (see Ask Jeeves Response to the Nofollow Attribute For Links).

This blog will be a great chance for SEMs to understand Ask Jeeves.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Also the SEW Blog has a link to the xml feed, which is http://blog.ask.com/index.rdf.

I am really getting tired of all the snow we are having in the New York area, really. We didn't have enough this weekend? Anyway, I woke up this morning to see the streets covered, and my car covered. I went over to Ask Jeeves and asked for the weather 10901. So it looks like it should be stopped around this afternoon time. Much faster then going to weather.com.

Ask Jeeves posted a special logo where Gary Price says it shows off a Smart Search feature, ski conditions for Squaw Valley, California. It just happens to be that Google is on their annual Ski trip at Squaw Valley, California. So Ask pokes fun at Google, its nice to see. The image is actually named "snowboard-dreams" and you will notice that the Butler is sitting, working at his desk, dreaming about going off skiing. Instead the butler is at work, building a better engine.

This morning we covered the reaction around the forums of the nofollow attribute. In that entry, I noted that Ask Jeeves was the lone engine of the major 4 to not join in on this announcement. So I took the liberty to email Jim Lanzone, a VP over at Ask Jeeves, to ask why. He said;

We talked with Matt Cutts yesterday about it and wished them well. It's a good idea and we wholeheartedly support the fight against spam. (I believe in the past Mr. Gardi has threatened to track spammers down personally to deliver that message. :)) And it's good to see the engines collaborating on something positive. On the other hand, when it comes to our particular engine, we didn't need to make a snap decision here. The nofollow idea is more urgent for Google (and those with similar approaches) than for Ask because they use global popularity (PageRank) while we use the local popularity approach pioneered by Teoma. I'm sure we'll add support for the new tag at some point in the near future if it makes sense. Blogs are a great source of authoritative information, regardless of their global pop ranking, which is what we pride ourselves on finding for our users.

I will go add this bit of information to the SEW Forum thread and see how people chew on that.

Yesterday, I ask for help to start of a thread on Ask Jeeves named The Little Engine That Could. I could not have received a better response, and thank you all who have participated.

The thread is about exploring Ask Jeeves weaknesses from the SEM's perspective. We are not talking about spam issues, although Mike Grehan did show one example. We are talking about, what will it take to encourage Ask Jeeves to really take Teoma to the battle lines and stand face to face with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Let me first summarize some of the responses by those who kicked off the thread and then note some of the points in Jim Lanzone (Senior Vice President, Ask Search Properties) reply.

Andrew Goodman was the first to reply to the thread, and a single quote can sum up his point.

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.

Ammon Johns who goes under the name "Black_Knight" at the forums was next up. Just to note, Ammon is one of those SEO individuals that I deeply respect and look up to. Ammon feels that they are the "The saddest waste I've ever seen in search."

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.

Danny Sullivan followed, he played the devil's advocate by saying they have done great things with shortcuts. In addition he put things a bit in perspective with this little comment.

Let's play "Where's Lycos" to see what they've avoided.

Ian McAnerin noted that he was getting fed up with the Teoma results that seemed to be getting worse and worse as time goes by. He said;

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

Mike Grehan an other SEO individual I deeply respect (I respect the others as well), added some of his personal discussion with the Ask Jeeves people as well as some criticism.

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...
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.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen who is one of the most well known SEM specialists in the International community adds his frustration with Teoma and its lack of support for international languages.

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.

Nacho Hernandez the leading SEM expert for the Hispanic marketplace chimes in as well. Nacho notes how Ask is targeting the younger (K - 12) crowd with creative tools, and that will make the difference in the long run.

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

Then we have Jim Lanzone the Senior Vice President, Ask Search Properties post a reply. In his reply he addresses many of the points addressed in the thread. I believe he left out the language support issues, sorry Mikkel and I,Brian. However he does explain that Teoma has been Ask Jeeves's "biggest investment". I pulled that slightly out of context, here is the full context; "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."

He ends off asking for advice, so lets give it to him and Ask. I for one, really do want to see Ask Jeeves step up and stare down Google, Yahoo and MSN. Teoma is unique, we all talk about it, Ask presents on it at every SES conference. Now its time for them to step up to the plate and make a statement to the SEM community that they are serious about Teoma. Jim does say in his reply that he is aware of the cannibalization of the Teoma results at Ask Jeeves by Google AdWords. He goes on to explain that Ask is a public company and he can't talk publicly about it, but he drops one line that gives us hope.

Give us some time and we'll find the right balance here.

Today I posted a thread in the Ask Jeeves forum at Search Engine Watch named The Little Engine That Could. I'll repost it here, but I would love it if you can provide feedback to your thoughts on the engine at the thread or here (preferably at the thread). Here is its:

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? 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 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.

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? :)

Danny beat me to it with his Google, Yahoo Post 2004 Most Popular Search Terms entry, however, I will link to the top search reports by the search engines here anyway.

- Google Top 2004 Search
- Yahoo Top 2004 Search
- Ask Jeeves Top 2004 Search
- AOL Top 2004 Search
- Lycos Top 2004 Search

I find it interesting when the smaller engines release keyword data. Today Ask Jeeves released their 2004 top keyword list. I am posting this just so I have the link to compare these top searches to Google's and Yahoo!'s at a later date.

The other day it was MSN, Google already has desktop search, Yahoo plans on it and now Ask Jeeves releases a desktop search appliance. It should be ready for download shortly at Ask Jeeves Download Center. Key features; Fresh, Full-Text Index, Fast, Flexible Search, and User-Centric Design. For the full press release go to PR News Wire.

I posted a thread about this at Search Engine Watch Forums.

About one and half weeks ago we discussed the topic of Search Engines to Provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services. Today, Shari Thurow wrote an excellent article recapping all the issues and topics related to this story in a ClickZ article named Search Engines and the SEO Business.

Andy reports that Ask Jeeves and Lycos is getting into the SEO business. Andy is not worried for his company, Keyword Rankings. He said:

I don't see a threat here for anyone other than very bad SEO firms. The good ones will still find plenty of clients. Besides, the search engines already offer PPC management solutions, yet PPC management is still being outsourced to third-party, impartial, SEM firms. The same will happen with SEO.

Some of the forums already picked up the news and are discussing it now. Over at I Help You Forums Kal lists the two pages to find these servers, Lycos's Site Side Optimization and Ask Jeeves Direct Marketing Solutions. Lycos clearly lists out the prices on a per page basis, Ask Jeeves does not. If you had a dynamic site with 100,000 pages, it can get pretty expensive.

I think someone asked why don't the search engines sell SEO services at one of the last conference I attended. I thought it was a no brainer, and so did the people who answered the question on the panel. It would be a conflict of interest for a search engine to provide SEO service.

These threads are definitely worth checking out in the following forums:
- I Help You
- Search Guild
- Search Engine Watch

Have you ever spoke with an expert in a field and asked them a question about a topic they should have the answer to, but they respond that they need to ask someone else? Well, what about Ask Jeeves? You do a search at Ask Jeeves, and then you find Mr. Jeeves requesting Google AdWords to give you the answer. Isn't Ask Jeeves suppose to be the expert (I believe that is the origin of "teoma" the technology Ask Jeeves uses to power the engine).

For example, do a search on pay per click at Ask Jeeves. The first 10 results are from AdWords and then if you scroll all the way down, you find the Teoma results.

One person at the WebmasterWorld conference asked why doesn't Ask Jeeves move those AdWords results away? In fact, someone said that when Ask had the PFI program, he saw that he was getting tons of impressions but zero click throughts, implying that no one really sees the Teoma results. Ask Jeeves is really proud of Teoma and I believe they should promote it more in their major search presence.

Do you think Ask Jeeves will Meltdown? like these other WebmasterWorld forum members? Will the cannibalization of its own technology hurt Ask Jeeves in the long run?

I have a few minutes between sessions and since its 4:30AM in New York, I can blog on this. First is a thread I started named New MSN Search Look???, which discusses Gary's post named Is This the New Look of MSN Search? which hints at what the new MSN search will look like when its released.

And, by way of email, a person sent me this link http://comcast.myway.com/ which is owned by Ask. Makes you think, what are these guys working on? And why did ASKJ drop so much!

The recent addition of MyJeeves was very popular amongst many people who are in the SEM industry. I know MyJeeves doesn't work on all browsers, including Safari - which is acceptable to me. But there are reports that MyJeeves doesn't work with AOL's browser. Not good, if this is the case.

This was way too funny for me not to mention here. Let me warn you, that this site will use language that, 5 years ago, would not be suitable for your kids. Give Aks Jeeves a spin.

Forum chatter at Search Engine Watch.

Yesterday, the news about MyJeeves Beta was leaked out, some sites/blogs were asked to removed the news, Andy Beal & Danny Sullivan, others were not. Anyway, its official now. Here is a quick summary of what was taking place over the last few months (or however long it took).

First, and most importantly Mr. Jeeves got a makeover. He is now, cleaner, wiser and ready for 2004. Here is a cute small article on that small topic. The image is from the article:

Second, MyJeeves Beta was officially announced. As I said above, it was illegally released yesterday (I think DM News will be banned from Ask now). Anyway, MyJeeves allows you to save search results in neat little folders, print those results and email them. In addition, it remembers your search history. The interface, I find, to be very clean, easy and intuitive, but I am bad with that - I pick up on these things quickly. Here are some screen captures of the MyJeeves features, for addition questions visit the MyJeeves FAQs:

Here you will see a normal Web search, I have highlighted in red a new link which reads "save". If you click on that "save" link, it changes and then reads "saving..." and then changes to "saved". That click, places the result in your "Saved Results" section of the MyJeeves "My Searches".

After you save the result, you can go to "MyJeeves" and then organize the results that you have saved into folders. The screen capture below, shows an example of me performing this task.

View Large Image

Finally, and what I find to be the most important change, is the release of Teoma 3.0. I started a thread on Teoma 3.0 at Search Engine Watch hoping to get some more details from the AskJeevesRep. This is what we know so far:
- enhanced relevance for query results
- an increased crawling frequency to refresh more often the index of general sites and news stories
- an expanded index that now has about 2 billion English-language Web documents, up from about 1.5 billion six months ago.
- The index is expected to grow to about 2.5 billion documents by the end of 2004.
- supports double-byte Asian languages and features a Japanese-language index, which currently has about 100 million Web documents.
- Enhancements to Teoma 3.0 expected in the fourth quarter include a page cache feature and a related search feature.
- ability for users to search only for Flash or PDF files.
- plans to launch a desktop search product

Make sure to drop by the AskJeeves and Teoma forums at:

• Search Engine Watch
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat
  
• and the other forums

Maybe that explains the mystery behind the sudden disappearance of Mr. Jeeves. Ask, one of my favorite search engines, has recently acquired CitySearch, and has already put this asset to use. In an article released this morning at DM News, Ask will be launching "My Jeeves" today or tomorrow. As Danny Sullivan says at the new SEW blog "Officially, the news wasn't supposed to come out until tomorrow."

Take a look at My Jeeves at http://myjeeves.ask.com/. I ran some tests, but seems to be still in beta. I'll keep you posted...The help documentation should be up shortly over here.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld.

Cute, fun and great marketing ploy?

Mr. Jeeves has left the Ask Jeeves front lawn. Take a look at Ask.com, he is missing. :)

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

Before calling a prospect that I never spoke with before, I look up to see where this person is located geographically. Normally, the leads I get are from the United States, so I look up the area code of the phone number to find out what time zone they are in. I do this ever now and then, but this time I tried to go with the invisible tabs approach.

I knew Yahoo! improved this just recently, so I did a search on the area code 507 at Yahoo!.

Now that was easy, I gave the prospect a call. Unfortunately, they are closed on Mondays. :)

So then I travelled over to Google to see what they are in the form of zip code look up. Keep in mind, I am just searching on 507 with no special prefix or special tab.

Not as pretty, but Google also gave me the information I was looking for without jumping through hoops.

Ok, now for my buddy Ask Jeeves. I thought it was a no brainer. Ask Jeeves is the leader in this type of stuff. Conducting a search at Ask on 507 did not, I repeat, did not, give me the information I wanted right on the search page. What happened to Ask Jeeves Search Smarter motto?

Conducting a search at Ask Jeeves on Web design some of the results returned have the new Binoculars(TM) Site Preview Tool feature. Of course you need to be a on a PC running Internet Explorer to see them.

So I switched over to my PC and took a look.

I saved and published this screen capture at the highest JPG resolution available, it looks identical to how I saw it on the screen. Besides for the understandably poor quality of the thumbnail, the title (contextual yellow box) hovers over the top portion of the screen thumbnail. This covers up a relatively large portion of the thumbnail. This disturbs me a little, can't they just remove the "title=Binoculars Site Preview" from the tag?

AskJeeves is making some noise early this week. Already three entries on them and its not even 9am (EST). On June 10th, Andy Beal reported seeing little binoculars in the search results at Ask.com. Then yesterday he announces before anyone else that Ask will be making this public. Today, I just received an email from Ask with this press release named Ask Jeeves Adds New SmartSearch(TM) Features; Upgrades Site with Binoculars(TM) Site Preview Tool. Over at SearchEngineWatch, Gary Price writes on how Ask Jeeves Sharpens Its Focus. Forum coverage on this topic has been taking place since June 10th at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Here are some interesting quotes from the press release:
"Binoculars reduced the number of results pages needed to be reviewed before finding the most relevant result by 50%"
"85.3% of users who tried Binoculars on Ask Jeeves said they would recommend the site to a friend"

Sounds interesting to me.

There has been reports that ineedhits.com has sent out an email informing customers that AskJeeves will be making major changes to its Paid Inclusion Program. I have not seen any real confirmation of this from AskJeeves but it seems as if they will be closing down this program.

Here is the quote from Warren who posted this information at several forums:

We have been advised that as of September 30th 2004, Ask Jeeves will be no longer accepting new submissions to the Site Submit Paid Inclusion program.

We understand this strategic decision will allow Ask Jeeves to provide additional focus on building their traffic whilst integrating the various companies� products that they have acquired recently into their product mix. This potentially includes integrating the Teoma results into the Interactive Search Holdings network. This will make Ask Jeeves the 7th largest American website by terms of unique visitors and should see their market share increase from approximate 3% to around 7%.

Customers who currently have URLs in Ask Jeeves Site Submit managed by ineedhits.com will continue to receive the full benefits of their current subscription until such time as their subscription expires. This includes click thru reporting, regular refreshes and access to customer service.

New customers have a window of opportunity to guarantee their place in the Ask Jeeves index, up until September 30th 2004 and receive a full 12 months subscription with all the benefits provided by Site Submit.

Ineedhits.com CEO Jackie Shervington said �Ineedhits.com is proud to have been associated with the Ask Jeeves Site Submit service for nearly 3 years, including launching the product to the market in February 2002. We are naturally disappointed with the news but will be working hard over the next few months to communicate with all our clients to ensure they can take full advantage of this window of opportunity before September 30th.�

• Search Engine Watch Forums
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• SEO Chat Forums
  
• HighRankings Forum
  

One of the largest complaints about AskJeeves search results is that they frame the results in a Ask window. It looks something like this:

But many do not know that you can turn off this default option within the User Preferences section. Just make sure the "Frame results" option is not checked off and your set.

A few post back, I mentioned I saw the AskJeevesRep active and lurking at the SearchEngineWatch Forums. Today the AskJeevesRep posted a reply to a message left by a member named Igor. Igor's post read:

I just noticed a big bug on Teamo. The short version is: Google has a system for ignoring the mirror sites that once gummed up its results; Teoma appears not to have a fix for this annoying practice. For example, search Teoma for the term "company names" (w/o quotes) and the "Resources" result column lists ten websites, seven of them being the identical mirror sites listed below:

ahundredmonkeys.com
naming-company.com
namingcompany.com
name-branding.com
companynamesbusiness.com
hundredmonkeys.com
onehundredmonkeys.com

AskJeevesRep, replied with:

You mention that Teoma has a big bug w.r.t mirror sites and that "company names" (without quotes) query brings up 10 links under "Resources" in which 7 are mirror sites.

As AskJeevesRep let me try to clarify: Teoma brings up 6 links under "Resources", not 10 as you cited, for the query 'company names' (without quotes). Further, only 2 are mirror sites in there: www.naming-company.com and www.name-branding.com, not 7. The 'hundredmonkeys' sites you mention are not in the Teoma Resources links we present.

We do have mirror detection in place; further, we are constantly working towards improving our mirror detection and other algorithmic capabilities.

Its nice to know that AskJeeves is out there, reading, improving and responding to the searchers needs.

I can't give too much information away, since I have insider information, but I thought I bring this spotting to the public. At about 5:30 (EST) on June 10th 2004, I found the AskJeevesRep screen name active at the Search Engine Watch Forums. Of course I took a screen capture.

But by the time I had a chance to see where this individual was lurking, he was already gone. Does this mean that we should be expecting to see Yahoo, Google, Overture, MSN and other search engine representatives lurking and posting information at the Search Engine Watch Forums?

AskJeeves's is powered by Teoma; Teoma is a wonderful search engine with a very unique and interesting method of ranking Web pages. I am of the opinion that Teoma provides very relevant results and provides an easy to use mechanism to narrow down your results.

However, AskJeeves places these results under its ten paid listing results. So in order to find these relevant results you need to scroll. Over at the new SEW Forums there is a thread discussing this topic.

Paid listings, some might say, are more relevant then some organic listings. The reasoning behind this is that actual companies would not pay for keywords that will not provide a ROI. And we all know that only relevant results should provide a good conversion rate and positive ROI.

But paid listings are not always as relevant in many ways. They are mostly all commercial in nature, so if i am search on search engine optimization, and I am looking for information on search engine optimization, then I want a resource site and not a SEO company. Organic results try to provide resource sites, or authoritative sites. Paid listing provide commercial sites.

With AskJeeves pushing commercial sites, will that prove to be AskJeeves downfall?

Ask Jeeves needs to take that next step in order to become a major player in the search engine industry. Ask Jeeves recently purchased Interactive Search Holdings, which had a great impact on its stock. Ask Jeeves doubled its market share with that purchase, giving them a total of "about 7% market share of the web search space", according to Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch. 7% is a respectable share of the market, but you and I know that Ask Jeeves wants a larger piece of the pie.

With the recent Google IPO, Yahoo!'s launch of Yahoo! Search, MSN Search expected to launch in the near future, and Amazon's A9 Search; Ask Jeeves has a lot to worry about. There is speculation that Ask Jeeves's next big move is to buy Terra Lycos, which has a market share of about 0.5%.

It will be a long road for Ask Jeeves but I am of the belief that Ask Jeeves will be the Apple Computers of the Search Engines Industry.

Read the forum discussion on this topic at WebmasterWorld and SEO Chat Forums.

I remember when Ask Jeeves was just born, so small, so cute and was so eager to start its life. Now, a few years later, our Ask Jeeves has grown so big.

BusinessWeek published an article named Piper Jaffray Ups Ask Jeeves to Outperform, where I quote "as his analysis of search traffic suggests that Ask Jeeves, with 19% sequential growth from the fourth quarter, grew faster than Yahoo's 13%."

Over at WebmasterWorld a senior member makes sure to point out,

Comparing rates of growth doesn't tell the whole story. AJ is coming from the basement in terms of market share, while Yahoo has a much larger audience. 19% of a small number is smaller growth (expressed as actual numbers) than 13% of a significantly larger number.

I was going to post this yesterday but by the time I got to my office, it was all over the place. So instead of posting a news item on it directly from the AskJeeves Web site like I planned, I will talk about the "what if".

Most of you who read this blog know what a big fan I am of Ask Jeeves and the Teoma Technology. I have been writing and praising Ask Jeeves since December 2003 when I begain writing Teoma - The Superior Search Engine? and my blog posting named Teoma Link Popularity: The Better PageRank?.

So why did I not think to buy the stock! I can tell you it was not because of monetary concerns. I was so into the technology and what it can do for improving relevancy that I did not think of investing in the stock. I did not think of taking advantage of the information I had at hand for financial purposes. I know the relevancy factor was not the sole reason for the stock price almost doubling but who cares.

Anyway, I am a bit bitter now. Less than last night when I heard the news in my car. So I will get over it.

Since this blog is really about forum coverage, here the forums that are discussing it:
- SEO Chat
- WebmasterWorld - Free Version
- IHelpYou
- JimWorld

I wrote a new article today, I know its Christmas but I am Jewish so I had some free time.

One search engine that really caught my attention at the search engine strategies conference in Chicago was Teoma. Teoma is the search engine that powers Ask Jeeves, also knows as the ask.com search site. Teoma has made several improvements to its engine over the past year or so that has drastically increased its index and the quality of results generated. They have a unique method of ranking sites that Teoma likes to call "authority". In addition, they have a Teoma toolbar and many of the advanced search features that other search engine have.

In the upcoming paragraphs I will cover the following:

- Teoma's History and Background
- Teoma's Search Technology
- Teoma's Features and Advanced Search Functions

Read the full Teoma - The Superior Search Engine? article here

Teoma uses something they call "Subject Specific" and "Communities" to rank their sites. Basically, a well ranked site needs to be within some type of subject specific category and part of a community. (I am still a bit foggy on the subject specific concept) But as Paul Gardi explained, everything in the world can be broken down into a community. He gave an example at the conference, people wearing blue shirts and have brown hair - that is a community. Anyway... Within those concepts is an other concept of hubs. Each community might have one hub or many hub. A hub is basically a site that links to other smaller sites, so a hub can link to an other hub or not. A site can link to a site and then link back to a hub.

The more a site is linked to within a community and (more importantly) the more authoritative a site linking to an other site is, the more weight that site is given. They are trying to figure out what the "expert sites" are and based on those experts sites, decide on what other sites for keywords within that community rank.