Barry Diller: ‘Goodbye Jeeves’
The media mogul’s search engine loses its butler mascot and name, becoming just Ask.
February 27, 2006
Barry Diller did what Bertie Wooster never could: on Monday he sent Jeeves packing. After nine years as the mascot of AskJeeves, the imperious butler is retiring as part of the underdog search engine’s biggest image overhaul since 1999.
Cleaved of Jeeves, the rebranded Ask.com is making a major marketing push to introduce its search engine to more Internet users. While the technological underpinnings of its search product are regarded as first-rate by the handful of people who pay close attention to search technology, the IAC-owned website has never developed a large consumer following. comScore Media Metrix recently ranked AskJeeves as the fifth most popular search site in the United States, handling a little more than 6 percent of all searches.
“The character has been an albatross around their neck for five years,” said Gary Stein, an industry analyst for BuzzMetrics and the author of Steinblog. “They needed an adult to come in and say ‘that’s enough.’”
Jim Lanzone, Ask’s vice president of product management, admitted that AskJeeves struggled in the marketplace for much of its existence, and not all of its problems can be pegged to the portly tuxedoed cartoon butler. “The brand overpromised and under-delivered,” he said.
Mr. Lanzone is quick to point out that the rebranded, simpler, and cleaner Ask.com site does not mean the company is looking to usurp Google as search’s champion. Google handled nearly 40 percent of all U.S. searches. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” he said.
With a view of the waterfront from its Oakland, California, offices, Ask performs well in the role of the scrappy runner-up to Google and Yahoo in their Silicon Valley “campuses” across the San Francisco Bay. But with Ask part of Mr. Diller’s IAC empire, there is little doubt that the mogul aims to make Ask a contender.
With this assembly of e-commerce sites, Mr. Diller could be planning to do for online transactions what AOL wants to do with its extensive collection of content, said Mr. Stein.
The Glue that Binds
Mr. Diller has said that Ask will serve as the glue binding together his broad portfolio of Internet properties, which include Ticketmaster, HSN, and LendingTree. The various sites, which draw about 40 million unique users a month, can drive traffic to Ask, just as Ask can send users to them.
And the search engine has slowly been gaining market share, even if it’s still a long way from Google. In December, Ask fielded 6.3 percent of all search queries, up 1 percent from 5.3 percent a year ago. Of course, that’s a far cry from Google’s 40 percent share. But as Mr. Diller has said in the past, no company keeps huge market share forever.
In its bid to lure more users, Ask offers a toolbar with a number of handy consumer features such as unit conversion, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia. The answers are still there, it’s just the butler that’s gone.
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