Ask Jeeves says it built the technology internally for its new program but also licensed some parts from a third-party vendor that it won’t name. Why not name if the other vendor was Miva, for example? It’s a likely candidate in having long-standing technology in the area and a licensing program.
“A lot of the reason we don’t want to talk about our partner is that we developed a lot of this in house. A big piece of it is not from the partner. We’re going to leverage off the IP [intellectual property] of the organization that we have for search,” Gardi said.
But I got a tip to check out the results on some popular terms at Ask, and lordy be, turns out that some of the ads are being served by Looksmart. Take a look for yourself. This is a query for “e-loan.” The first “sponsored” result – E-Loan – gives this URL:
….//tm.ask.com/r?t=an&s=a&uid=0082EE2D8DA597E24&sid=180D69D8C158F0F24&o=
10234&qid=90C8B368E677CD50AB1CE9E57874F586&io=0&sv=0a300514&ask=e-
loan&uip=43a922b6&en=aj&eo=&pt=E-LOAN%20%3F%20(Official%20Site)
&ac=24&qs=1&pg=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Faskj-adtrack.looksmart.com%2Fog%2Fpr%
3DPsr%3Bro%3D1%3Brc%3D1%3Bla%3D365857%3Blm%3D322774%3Bkw%
3D14557279%3Bed%3D20050801%3Bii%3D78ea.79f6.42f0fcc9.94b%3Bpn%3D%3Bto%
3D%3Btc%3D1%3Bpo%3D1%3Bpc%3D1%3Bpi%3Daj_reply_13%3Bts%3D%7Chttp%3A%
2F%2Fwww.eloan.com%2F%3Fuser%3Dask%26mcode%3Daskkw4mdq…
Note the part I bolded….it’s clear that Ask and Looksmart are sharing APIs, and probably more.
That might explain why Ask is reticent to talk about who their third party partner is – Looksmart was tarred with a lot of crappy traffic and poor results over the past few years, and has been on life support since it lost the Microsoft account over a year ago. But I recently spoke with Looksmart CEO David Hills (no, he was not my source…), who came in last year to turn the company around. He had a very clear eyed view of his company’s problems, and a very practical approach to to solving them: get rid of the fraud and the crap, and focus on partnering. Looks like Ask might be his first big deal.