It’s not like he didn’t see the warning signs: the occasional disappearances from the Web site, the increasing tendency to drop his name from the company title, and the little digs from boss Barry Diller about his weight. Clearly, his days were numbered.
So butler Jeeves can’t be surprised that he’s finally being retired from the Ask Jeeves search engine site—with a retirement party set for Feb. 27. Following his departure, the search engine will do business under the Ask name.
The news that Ask.com will finally dispense with Jeeves’ services broke on Saturday in a post from Jim Lanzone, the company’s senior vice president of search properties. He pointed out that some users saw the butler character who has represented the search engine since 1996 as a symbol of personalized help, important at a time when searching the Internet still seemed unfamiliar and robotic.
“On the other hand, there are people who reel back at the very notion of Jeeves, who think he signifies weak technology, slows down the site, and embodies over-commercialization and over-promise,” Lanzone said. Even those ambivalent about the character associated Jeeves with a site where users could ask questions in natural speech and get answers — something most search users no longer need to do, thanks to the success of Google and Yahoo!
Lanzone noted that Ask has made many moves to integrate tech features into its search portfolio, including personalization (MyJeeves), preview panes on results pages (Binoculars) and search term suggestions (Zoom). The engine has also been engaged since April 2005 in a process of reducing the number of paid ads on its results pages, an initiative that reduced Ask’s per-query revenue but was deemed necessary to improve the user experience. “Heck, now we even have the fewest ads above the fold of any of the major search engines,” Lanzone said.
All these changes were largely responsible for a 20% increase in Ask’s share of the U.S. search market in 2005, to 6.3%, according to comScore Media Metrix. A Keynote Systems study in February 2006 also found that Ask Jeeves had substantially improved in customer perception of its search quality during the previous year.
But the clock really started ticking on Jeeves’ employment when Ask Jeeves was purchased by IAC/InterActive Corp. in March 2005. By September, IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller was telling a Goldman Sachs analyst conference that “Jeeves will disappear,” largely because natural-language queries were becoming less important to search users than keyword search and relevant results.
“Not that I don’t like that fat butler,” Diller added. In fact, Jeeves has slimmed down considerably since his 1996 debut as a mascot, as well as going from chalk-white to a natural skin tone.
The company has set up a micro-site at www.jeevesretirement.com where visitors can click on Jeeves’ resignation letter, leave a farewell message and vote on his retirement plans. (At press time, a sail around the world was the top vote getter, with pouring Mai-Tais at a surfside bar the second choice.)
