Last year, Ask Jeeves was so marginal to the search industry that it couldn’t get subpoenaed.
The Berkley CA-based engine, born ten years ago in the heyday of Lycos and Alta Vista, had been so thoroughly trounced by Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search and AOL in the race for market share that when the U.S. Department of Justice went looking for search records from those companies last year, it didn’t even come knocking at Ask’s door.
The feds might show more interest today, now that key repositioning moves have apparently begun to pay off for the littlest big search engine. Once dormant to the point of coma, Ask’s usage numbers have climbed over the last year, thanks to some key acquisitions, its own purchase by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp conglomerate, a site re-design, a re-branding as Ask.com—and incidentally, the re-tirement of its butler mascot.
According to comScore Networks, Ask fielded 376 million queries in March, an increase in U.S. market share of about half a percentage point over its stats for the same month in 2005. Granted, that’s only about 5.9% of U.S. searches for the month, putting Ask behind MSN, Yahoo! and AOL, and way, way behind Google’s 42.7% of searches. But the fact remains that only Google and Ask grew their shares for the month, indicating that the company may have hit on a combination its rivals will have to pay some attention to.
And they are watching, and apparently appreciating what they see. Last Friday, Ask CEO Steve Berkowitz, a driving force behind the changes, got the call from Microsoft and left to become a senior vice president at MSN’s online business group. IAC moved quickly to appoint Ask vice president and general manager Jim Lanzone as CEO.
Could this perennial also-ran finally be poised to break into the big time?
“We’ve been working for the last three years to get to this point,” says Daniel Read, vice president of consumer products and user experience at Ask. “That included acquiring our own proprietary search technology and a lot of intensive innovation in core search technology—things like Smart Answers [quick information hits and links at the top of many results pages] and a proprietary saving system once called My Jeeves, now My Stuff. So the search industry has always given us a lot of props. But it’s been a tough challenge to get that message out to a wider audience.”
In that respect, the old Ask Jeeves brand was a victim of its own success, he says. The “ask a natural question and get an answer” gimmick was a strong differentiating point in 1998 and probably a help to some newbie users. “The bar for search was much lower back then—in fact, the bar didn’t even exist,” Read says. “But search technology emerged that surpassed the original knowledge-based stuff we had developed. The old Ask Jeeves became a special site for special requests.”
Ask has revolutionized its product by re-tooling core search technology, Smart Answers and vertical search content. Now, with the re-launch, the company is ‘Pushing Ask.com to become known as one of the leading search engines globally,” he says. “We’ve been innovating, and now, with the re-positioning of the brand, hopefully we’ll get more trials. We want to put the brand on a different plane and be known as a great everyday search engine.”
IAC chairman and CEO Diller has said he bought Ask last year because he saw growth potential in the company. And he’s made no bones about the fact that he’s looking in the short term to see usage growth rather than revenue increases for the engine.
The redesigned, Jeeves-less home page reflects a desire to take some good elements from the search leaders, Read says. “Google’s start page is clean and uncluttered, but Yahoo!’s built with an ‘innards-out’ approach that lets you see everything on one page. We’ve tried to strike a balance: The home page is as clean if not cleaner than anything out there, but at the same time a tool box on the right lets you see what key services and functions are available right from the home page.”
The tools represent either functions or vertical search entry points such as Web, image search, shopping, news, desktop and local search, or maps and directions. There are about 20 such tools now, displayed 10 at a time with the ability to scroll through. Users can drag and drop the tools they use most often to keep the optimum display on their Ask search page. “We think of it as a speed dial for search,” Read says. “and some users have compared it to the click wheel on an iPod.”
The tool box can also be minimized into a strip of icons, making it suitable as a widget for a Firefox plug-in, on a browser toolbar or on a mobile phone. “The tool box is going to become a universal access mechanism across many different access points,” he says.
Ask now offers Smart Answers in more than 500 content types, using outside content and its own proprietary matching technology. For example, doing a search on “Brad Pitt” bring s up a Smart Answer that includes biographical data and image links, along with links to his films and to encyclopedia entries, and a handful of the latest headlines for Mr. Pitt. Ask launched Smart Answers back in 2003 and has been aggressive about rolling them out ever since. Read says they’re an important way to add value to searches and build customer satisfaction where they appear. “Vertical search content is going to play a larger and larger role as search goes forward. People are looking for direct information, but they’re also looking for a deeper experience.”
User might also find it valuable that the Smart answers content appears above the sponsored listings, so that the top-line item on a results page is an actual result, not a keyword-linked ad.
Or sometimes a narrower one. That’s why another feature of the re-launch is a set of topics that can focus or widen a search by topics right from the results page, called Zoom. The same Brad Pitt search offers links to zero in on Pitt wallpaper, Pitt in the movie “Troy”, or the question “How old is Brad Pitt?” Or searchers can broaden their query to the TV show “Friends”, in which Pitt had a cameo appearance, or the movie “Fight Club”. The Ask search algorithm can also pick out and link to proper names related to a query—in Pitt’s case, Johnny Depp, Ashton Kutscher and Justin Timberlake. It’s also geographically aware: For the query “civil war”, the U.S. version will produce “slavery” and Robert E. Lee as Zoom topics, while the U.K. version will produce Oliver Cromwell.
One of the most interesting search results features in Ask is Binoculars. Roll the mouse over a binocular icon under a search results link, and you’ll see a thumbnail of the web page, giving you a view into the site before you surf to it. Actually rolled out prior to the re-launch, Binoculars got larger thumbnails and better resolution in the new Ask and gets some TV exposure in the commercials that make up the offline portion of an integrated ad campaign under the tagline, “Use tools. Feel human.”
Mapping has become a competitive arena for searches looking for Web stickiness, and the mapmakers at Ask “really geeked out” on the function, says Read, who himself used to wor on geo-demographic systems for the British post office. The maps offer aerial photography that is higher in resolution than most other maps use, drag-and-drop location pins that recalculate directions on the fly, the ability to build a 10-stop itinerary, and a “play” button that lets the user see the turn-by-turn directions on that trip in progress. Stops can be added by right-clicking on the map; the program will take its own educated guess as to the street address for that point. Directions even come in two flavors, driving and walking—because why should pedestrians care that a street is one-way?
So Ask seems to have the innovative tools and the re-branded Web site to encourage user adoption. The third leg of the stool is, as it has been for a while, “demonetization”—as in cutting banner ads and cutting back on the number of sponsored listings that appear on search pages in order to get more organic content out to the user. This reduction cuts paid ads back to no more than three at the top and no more than five at the bottom, with the right rail reserved for features such as the Zoom links. “We’ve tinkered with this and found that to be the best configuration for efficient monetization and a really world-class user experience,” Read says. “We want to create good frequency and repeat usage.”
That approach seems likely to continue under new Ask CEO Lanzone. “We have a lot of momentum behind Ask.com,” Lanzone said in a statement after his appointment Monday. “With the team we have in place and the backing of IAC, I believe Ask can take a significant piece of the search pie in the years ahead.”