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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.
Pepsi operates "at a world class level", but they "just have a different flavor" than Coca-Cola.
Burger King operates "at a world class level", but they "just have a different flavor" than McDonalds.
We don't like monopolies in our marketplace, and as a result we always have a place for the perpetual also-ran. Never able to capture the #1 spot may seem depressing, but it's still possible to profit as a #2 and be lying in wait in case the #1 player makes real big mistakes.
Google will have to seriously misbehave in order to give up enough market share so that Ask Jeeves can pass them. However, having Ask Jeeves parked in the #2 rank spot is enough motivation that hopefully Google will never forget its "Don't be Evil" policy.
Kind of like pork ice cream.
--Chag
"Ask Jeeves is touting its service as more user-friendly because it doesn't require the installation of any toolbars or software programs."
FUD. Google and other search engines don't require toolbars or software installation.
"The next generation of search isn't going to be about who can build the biggest indexes (of Web pages)," said analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research. "It's going to about finding better ways to personalize search results and modify the way the results are presented."
That's outright idiotic. I want the most relevant search results based on the largest index possible.
I just 'asked jeeves' to look up my real name in quotation marks: 481 hits. Google? 1420. A quick glance to the last hits on Google are indeed relevant. What has AskJeeves missed? Google isn't going to rest on their laurels, AskJeeves will be playing perpetual catch-up. Now when have you heard "Ask Jeeves" used in the common vocabulary? What about Google? It's a used as a verb now.
Trolling is a art,
It was certainly distinguishing itself in my logs... I recently moved to a "gallery.lazylightning.org" setup from lazylightning.org/gallery/. Oblivious to the problems this would cause w/my robots.txt I had every spider and their brother killing my webserver with requests.
:)
Anyway, so I create a new robots.txt file that includes all the individual directories from the gallery directories. AskJeeves apparently read the robots.txt the day before and thought it was then ok to index the site after that at its leisure. It spent the next two days indexing my site even though it was ignoring the new robots.txt put in place about 24 hours before.
AskJeeves will no longer be indexing my site as I just banned their know IP ranges. If you are going to compete as a search engine you best make the people you are spidering happy.
MSNBot was spending the time indexing my site as well but they didn't fail to ignore the new robots.txt that was put out there. Thanks!
"Google is not better than us," Jim Lanzone of Ask Jeeves said. "Google is nowhere near as good as we are! In fact, Google does not exist! They are nowhere near Bagdhad! And we have shot down one of their Apache helicopters!"
Before:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030324210627/http://
After:
http://ask.com/
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
Just because Google thus far has been a very good company and used its power appropriately doesn't mean we should be satisfied with only one search engine. If we want to see innovation we need healthy competition, so I wish AskJeeves and all the others good luck.
I had never heard of Ask Jeeves until I googled for it.
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.
"Google is not better than us," said Jim Lanzone
...we have a cartoon butler!!
They just deliver better results and are more useful to the average user. And if that makes them better... [whispers to aide]what was my point again[/whisper]
it deifnitely appears to be a critical time for search engines.
It also deifnitely appears to be a critical time for dictionary.com.
Query: "Does AskJeeves suck?" First Hit Title: "10/19/1999: ASK JEEVES is the worst site on the internet" I'd say it works pretty well... :)
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
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."
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
What, you mean like ~detect~? Seems to have a wildcard function to me.. aswell as literally hundreds of advanced functions that almost no other search engines posses..
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!