Comments on: News: Jeeves Stretches Out, Gets Personal

By: Richard Evans Lee

Richard Evans Lee — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 23:42:13 +0000

My own testing of AJ against Google and Yahoo for my assorted sites shows incredible irrelevance. I'm not complaining that I'm not listed. Jeeves has indexed some of my sites heavily. One domain had to be go to a more expensive hosting plan because of the "Jeeves bot's" hunger. But the results are silly. Sometimes the first link is to one of my affilate links. OK for making money but hardly the most relevant result.

And on some searches the paid, er, 'sponsored' results are so thick that I didn't get to the real results until I hit the Page Down key.

While Jeeves gives a couple of my sites a surprisingly high number of visitors I'd no more use it for searching than I'd ask Bertie Wooster for financial advice.

By: Doug Mehus

Doug Mehus — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 22:35:33 +0000

Also, don't forget: Ask Jeeves' search results are the least relevant of the major search engines. Its own Teoma algorithmic search results are even less relevant, in my opinion.

I don't consider Ask Jeeves an innovator in the search space -- that's Yahoo! and Google's domain. The only thing Ask Jeeves does well is operating multi-brand Web portals on the cheap and continuing to increase its audience. It will never be a major player in search though.

This "new" product is something I'd never use and is a complete waste of time, IMHO. It's a sham.

Cheers,
Doug

By: Chris Zaharias

Chris Zaharias — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 20:03:33 +0000

Plus, I think their “charity” thing with the Red Cross is a total sham. Ask Jeeves is effectively donating their advertisers’ money, encouraging false clicks, and taking a tax write-off in the process. Bad.

By: Chris Zaharias

Chris Zaharias — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 20:01:51 +0000

I see things much differently. Ask Jeeves drives a higher % of its searches to paid search click throughs than any other major search engine (70%+ vs

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:32:02 +0000

As you say, " a future in which personal publishing is very much integrated into search, and vise versa".

Ultimately relevancy will be the winner when the engines can mine the cache of targeted groups.

A gigantic Epinions except the opinions will be backed by consensus from a dozen angles.

This is an exciting time.