The Web search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves has officially pensioned off its butler mascot. The site — now officially known as Ask.com — unveiled its new Jeeves-less look today, timing the re-launch to coincide with the opening of Search Engine Strategies New York ’06, where Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of parent company IAC/InterActive Corp., gave the keynote.
“We needed to drop some baggage, and the baggage was, I thought, that character,” Diller said. “It connoted something that I didn’t think allowed Ask to play in the center world of search.” That “something” was the wide public impression that Ask Jeeves was distinguished primarily by its use of natural-language search queries. In fact, Ask Jeeves dropped those predictive questions from its feature set five years ago, when users grew accustomed to keyword searching.
The new Ask.com sight was demonstrated onstage by Jim Lanzone, Ask’s senior vice president of search properties, as part of Diller’s talk. The new home page is predominantly white and clutter-free, without ads. A toolbox along the right edge lets users select to search the Web or do more specialized news, image or local searches. They can also select a number of reference tools for an encyclopedia, dictionary or thesaurus, currency and unit conversions, and a phone directory.
“We’ve found that people use these kinds of tools,” Lanzone said. “Dictionary is the number one search that we get every week on Ask.com. But people didn’t know that they could get that right from our site.”
The new Ask.com offers users a new Web-based desktop search application similar to Google’s, and also includes a toolbar button for Bloglines, the popular blog aggregator that IAC acquired last year. Its mapping service offers aerial views like those at other search sites but puts more emphasis on trip planning and driving directions. Users can simply drag and drop the “pushpin” at the end of a trip to plot another course on the fly. Users can even customize the directions for walking rather than driving, to ignore one-way streets.
“It’s like putting search on speed dial,” Lanzone said. “A lot of people in the industry know about the value of these tools, but the average user doesn’t. This is how we’re showing them what’s in the Swiss army knife.”
Diller, one of the motivators behind the creation of the Fox TV channel, was asked if he thought the search market was ready for the same kind of “fourth network”. He said what was needed was a differentiated search engine. “In making the Fox Channel in the ’80s, we didn’t want to make another network; we wanted to make an alternative to the three networks. If you use the site and access the easy way that Ask arranges information-gathering, I think you’ll see the differentiation.”
As he has said before, Diller stressed that this was a time for development and building at Ask, not for grabbing market share from competitors like Google and MSN. “I don’t think that it matters whether we have 6% [of the search market] or 2%,” he said. “What matters is whether we’re relevant.”
As a standalone company before its purchase by IAC last year, “Ask Jeeves had to dance to the tune of the Street, it had to meet its quarterly numbers, and it had far too many ads on the page.” Diller said. “So it really couldn’t compete. This is the first time we’re saying, ‘Try it. It does have differentiating things about it, and you may like them.’ I’m convinced that we will gain people that want to use it, either as their first choice or their second choice.”
Regarding Ask.com’s competitors, Diller said he found Google’s unofficial company slogan, “Don’t Be Evil,” to be “a bit pretentious.” “Google is now in real business, and like any business, they do a lot of things that some people are not going to like, and those people will think badly of them: competitors, people who’ve had the algorithm change on them so they’ve lost business.”
On the bad publicity Google and Yahoo! have received for cooperating with the Chinese Government’s desire to control the Web pages its citizens can access through search, Diller said the issue had been overblown by the media. “If you’re going function in another country, you have to obey the country’s rules,” he said. “If you can’t then don’t go. You can’t complain about it or get critical about it. You simply have to say, ‘Can I stomach operating in a country that has, God knows, enough people to make it a market and has certainly come a long way in terms of having a business culture.” Several of IAC’s Web properties operate in China now, and the company has plans to offer a regional search engine there, Diller said.
He also said that Ask.com would resist any attempts by the U.S. government to acquire data about searches and keywords, such as the subpoenas the Justice Department recently pressed against Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. “All of us in the information world have enormous amounts of data on customers and employees, and we have an absolute obligation to protect it,” he said. “Guard it with your life. If you don’t you’re going to lose your customers.”
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