Very Over, Jeeves: Mascot Gets His Walking Papers

Jeeves the search butler has heard his master’s voice, and it said: Hit the bricks.

Reports from a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York Wednesday say the long-time mascot of search engine Ask Jeeves will get his walking papers at some unspecified date.

News of the booted butler came from Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActive Corp., which purchased the search engine in July.

“Jeeves will disappear, and we will probably be called Ask or Ask.com,” Diller said in published reports. Ask.com has long been the URL for the Ask Jeeves home page.

Diller said company research had indicated that the butler icon did not suit the image IAC wanted to convey with its search property. That research revealed that consumers thought the engine was “old-fashioned” and remembered it primarily as the search that could handle natural-language queries — a feature that has become less important to users than the relevance and scope of results.

He said that search capability would be “the glue for almost all of our services” at IAC, including Ticketmaster, Match.com, Lending tree, Gifts.com and the Citysearch local directories.

“[Search] is a very big business for us,” Diller 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 over 25% from the same time a year ago.

When IAC announced its intention to buy Ask Jeeves back in April, Diller made a point of stressing the search engine’s capacity for growth and for increased revenue from ad revenue. “Only four or five players will thrive in this market,” he said at that time, adding that with only a 3% share of searches, the fifth-ranked Ask had great potential to be one of those growth vehicles.

After the IAC purchase, Ask Jeeves announced it would begin selling its own paid search ads and running them alongside the ads it places through Google AdWords.

The Jeeves mascot dates back to Ask Jeeves’ launch in 1996. In the last year, the figure has gone through a makeover, dropping some pounds and gaining some natural color.

In 2000, the Jeeves name even occasioned complaints from the estate of P.G. Wodehouse, the author who wrote hundreds of stories about “gentleman’s gentleman” Jeeves and his twittish master, Bertie Wooster. After first maintaining that the figure was just a generic butler, the search engine resolved the issue amicably with the Wodehouse estate. The Jeeves home page contains a link to the official Wodehouse site.