The jury’s still out on whether Jeeves the search butler gets a pink slip. That was one important insight to come out of the opening keynote at the Search Engine Strategies 2005 conference in San Jose Tuesday morning, when Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowitz addressed the meeting about his company’s new branding plans, new paid ad network, and new boss, Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp.
All those new circumstances are at work inside Ask Jeeves now and producing efforts on a number of fronts, Berkowitz told the audience. Regarding the search engine product itself, the company is hoping to increase market share. Ask Jeeves is usually ranked fifth in usage among the five major search engines. In announcing IAC’s intention to acquire it in April 2005, Diller said explicitly that Ask Jeeves had the potential to grow.
“Barry came in and told us, “I’ve tried the product, I love the product—now I want to know how to grow market share,’” Berkowitz said. The answer will be enhanced focus on the core search service and improvements to the user experience, he said.
“Since I’ve been at Jeeves, the biggest challenge has been getting people to understand that we’re not just a question-and-answer service but great core search,” Berkowitz said, referring to Jeeves’ natural-language search function, once its most distinctive feature. He said the company might do more television advertising, something it resumed in January after more than three years and which produced a 20% growth in usage during the first six months of this year. “The brand has great appeal, and we’re spending a lot of effort to determine the right branding that will let us go out and reach a lot of consumers,” he said. “We know our technology is awesome, and that the product is well differentiated. Now we have to figure out how to let the consumer know who we are and the best way to use our service.”
IAC operates a large portfolio of Web sites ranging from HSN.com and Citysearch to match.com and Ticketmaster, and Berkowitz said the plan is to integrate Ask Jeeves search boxes into those properties. But he was careful to point out that IAC did not acquire Jeeves to construct a “walled garden” that would serve up only its own content on search results pages. “From our perspective, the purchase lets us leverage lots of valuable IAC content and transactional or structured data,” he said. “But IAC bought Ask Jeeves to grow share, and that can only be done in a way that the consumer feels is providing the best search experience.” Integration with Citysearch’s local data, HSN.com’s shopping choices or entertainment from Ticketmaster will aim at improving customer experience. “Barry’s not looking to make an extra nickel or two from serving IAC content exclusively,” he said.
The new Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings program begins selling paid search ads to new customers on Aug. 15, but Berkowitz said its launch was less about replacing Google AdWords listings than about amassing the insight into search advertising products that will help Jeeves manage advertiser relations better. The new ad network will replace up to three of the search results page ads that are now provided by Google with pay-per-click listings sold directly by Jeeves.
“As part of IAC, we need to understand what’s going on with our advertisers and their conversions and to let them feel that they an deal directly with us,” Berkowitz said. He said that the launch was not intended to supplant Google, which has a contract to serve ads on Ask Jeeves results pages until 2007. “It’s not about Google, or MSN, or Yahoo! We continue to have a great relationship with Google and will rely on their services to grow both domestically and globally.”
Ask Jeeves owns a number of other Internet products, including the My Way personalized search, Smiley Central offering downloadable icons for instant messaging and e-mail, the Zoom and Web answers search navigation tools, and the Binoculars site preview feature. The company came in for criticism from many online observers earlier this year for allegedly including or permitting adware in the toolbars and downloads for these products. But Berkowitz says that problem has been solved by setting up a process to make sure third parties and affiliates offering those tools did not add software that layered in applications consumers were not aware of, such as pop-up programs.
“There have been bad actors who have taken our products, which are offered on a cost-per-action basis, and tried to defraud us by forcing applications onto the desktop,” he said. “But we set up a compliance office and continue to audit the software to make sure it doesn’t do any of that stuff. And I’ll stand up in front of anyone and talk about the quality of our products. They are clean, they are exactly focused on what users want, and judging by the active use of the products, they love them.”
Back on the question of a possible corporate re-naming, Berkowitz said his team is looking at what will further grow the company brand without discarding the high recognition it has won. Research shows that Ask Jeeves has 70% to 80% aided awareness among consumers and 30% to 40% unaided awareness, he said, so a name change will probably be an evolution, not a revolution.
“We’re looking at everything, but there’s very little chance we’re going to go with something other than Ask or Jeeves or Ask Jeeves,” Berkowitz said. “So for now, the butler is safe. He’s a bit trimmer, but he’s safe.”
