Ask Jeeves Looks to Outshine Google

bizpile writes "The AP is reporting that Ask Jeeves is looking to distinguish itself from its competitors by adding new tools for visitors to save and organize links to Web pages they find through the company's online search engine. "Google is not better than us," said Jim Lanzone, an Ask Jeeves senior vice president. "We are both operating at a world-class level. We just have a different flavor." This free feature is scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday." With Amazon's new search engine recently arising, it definitely appears to be a critical time for search engines.

Comments

A Younger Jeeves

[TheJavaGuy]

It looks like Mr. Jeeves got a lot younger.
Before:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030324210627/http://a sk.com/

After:
http://ask.com/

Seriously

[jetkust]

Lets face it, people don't want to organize links. The only thing they want is to find what they are looking for. The one that does that the best is the best engine. The one that finds exactly what you're looking for every time. THIS is the next generation search engine.

Why is this so difficult?

[Control Group]

They don't Get It(tm).

That's all there is to it. Based on this blurb, I went to look at Ask Jeeves, and see what they had to offer. Ran a search, clicked on a result - and they lost me when they kept control of a portion of my browser window so I could run another search.

I don't understand why so many companies don't understand such a simple concept: get off my back. Isn't Google's example clear enough for them? I like Google because it's fast and accurate, by and large. Because it's a simple page that loads quickly even if I'm somewhere on a dialup. It doesn't pop windows over or under my browser window. In short, Google acts like they want to help me, rather than like they want me to help them.

That's all there is to it. I can't think of a feature a search engine could add that would overcome Google's interface advantage. To get my clicks, another search engine would have to have an even more simple interface, and I see that being hard to accomplish.

Wait, I lied. If a search engine was able to somehow figure out what I mean conceptually rather than contextually, I would use it all the time...but since that would require an almost human level of language comprehension, I don't think I'll need to worry about switching any time soon. As it stands, AJ's "natural language" abilities were just "we won't tell you we ignored 'of' and 'the' in your search request."

Re:Perpetual also-rans have a place in this world.

[3terrabyte]

Different flavor, as embarressing logo.

Also, they didn't mention one very important thing. Google's Cache. Extremely important in many of my searches where ANY reference to something is needed, even an old link...text only.

CACHE!!

Re:Perpetual also-rans have a place in this world.

[afidel]

One little trick I use which is often helpfull for eliminating the online retailers that have google bombed is to use -shipping at the end of my search. This will generally eliminate sites wishing to sell me the product and leave legit sites with info about the product alone.

Its "natural language" feature doesn't work

[dpbsmith]

In theory, if Jeeves actually did a good job of understanding natural language--as good as decade-old AI--it would be very useful for certain kinds of searches that are difficult on Google (without using a certain amount of lateral thinking).

For example, there is a series of detective novels by in which the author Jack London, best known as the author of "The Call of the Wild," is a character (the detective, in fact).

If you can't remember the author or title and want to find these books, it is very difficult to do so with Google. Most searches return mishmashes of results about the author Jack London and detective novels by other authors.

If the premise of AskJeeves were correct, it would be perfect for this search.

But, in fact, if you type in "What are some detective novels in which Jack London appears as a character?" you get exactly the same kind of mishmash as Google gives you. AskJeeves isn't, for example, smart enough to go in turn to amazon.com and search in "books" for "Jack London detective" (which returns "The Golden Gate Murders" by Peter King as the second hit).

AskJeeves doesn't seem to do much more than throw away irrelevant words.

If the "natural language" feature of AskJeeves worked, it would be part of my search toolkit. In fact, every time I've used AskJeeves, the results I get are inferior to those I get with Google or Yahoo.