Jeeves, the longtime mascot of search engine Ask Jeeves, will soon get his walking papers.
News of the butler’s booting came from Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActive Corp., which purchased the search engine in July.
“Jeeves will disappear, and we probably will be called Ask or Ask.com,” Diller said in published reports. Ask.com has long been the URL for Ask Jeeves’ home page.
Diller said company research indicated that the butler icon did not suit the image IAC wanted to convey with its search property. Consumers found the engine “old-fashioned” and remembered it primarily for its handling of natural-language queries, a feature that has become less important than the relevance and scope of results.
The enhanced search capability will be “the glue for almost all our services” at IAC, including Ticketmaster, Match.com, LendingTree.com, Gifts.com and the CitySearch local directories, Diller continued.
“[Search] is a very big business for us,” he said. “Getting that integrated with the company is probably the next priority.” He said the average number of search queries at Ask Jeeves was up more than 25% from the same time a year ago.
The Jeeves mascot dates back to Ask Jeeves’ launch in 1996. In the last year, the character has gone through a makeover, dropping some pounds and gaining some natural color.
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