Poor old Jeeves was dropped by Ask in 2006 in the first of a number of facelifts for the Ask search engine, but he has now returned, refreshed and ready to answer the questions that we want to pose to him.
It always struck me as a mistake for Ask to drop Jeeves, and I was surprised to realise that it’s 3 years since he has been dropped – I’ve not really used Ask all that much as a search engine since he has been gone, despite the fact that Ask Jeeves was probably the first search engine that I ever used – back when I was pretty much stuck in the AOL version of the Internet, and was astounded to find so much more information out there than I had realised previously.
Ask claim that Jeeves has been brought back as a result of user demand, rather than to boost poor performance, Managing director Cesar Mascaraque says “We have seen a growth of 20% this year, so we are not struggling” – however, Ask has for some time now been a little used search engine, despite having some nice features, especially when looking for answers to questions.
At the moment on the Ask Jeeves search home page, the question of the day that Jeeves in answering is “Why am I back?
The fictional Jeeves character says “I popped out three years ago to travel the world in a quest for knowledge and I’ve returned to Blighty armed with answers. During my sojourn research showed the public wanted me back, which I found jolly touching”.
I always felt that Jeeves gave Ask something a bit different from the other search engines that I have used. He adds character and depth to an industry that doesn’t have a great amount of interesting characters, and I always felt it was a mistake when they dropped him.
However, considering that Hitwise currently has the Google market share for search engine usage of approximately 87% (May 2008), Ask and the rest are fighting out for a very small section of the market, with no sign of Google’s market share decreasing any time soon.
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