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.

Perpetual also-rans have a place in this world.

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.

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

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.

Of course, your "Ease of typing" argument gets completely reversed on you when you take into account the fact that you can use "ask.com" or even "aj.com" to get to Ask Jeeves.

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

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.

Just as good as Google....

The line Google is not better than us, we're both world class reminds me so much of Doctor Nick's "As Good As Doctor Hibbert" yellow page ad in the Simpsons.

Flavor?

"We are both operating at a world-class level. We just have a different flavor."

Kind of like pork ice cream.

Re:Flavor?

Kind of like pork ice cream.

Or from one of the Simpsons episodes, where they visit a dollar store and pass a stack of cases of

Cool Ranch Cola

My stomach turns every time I think what that might be like.

What's the big deal with Google?

I use different search engines all the time, more for a laugh than anything. Frankly, they all find what I'm looking for. I like the fact that they don't all suffer from Google's inability to cope with wildcards.

Detect*

is more convenient than

detect OR detecting OR detects OR detector

for example.

Oh re-hehehehe-eally?

What, you mean like ~detect~ [google.com]? Seems to have a wildcard function to me.. aswell as literally hundreds of advanced functions that almost no other search engines posses..

Re:Oh re-hehehehe-eally?

... you mean like ~detect~? Seems to have a wildcard function to me..

That's not wildcard, that's synonym searching. From the Google docs [google.com]:

" ~" Searches

You may want to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. Indicate a search for both by placing the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of the keyword.

For example, to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information, use:

~food ~facts

Google does do wildcards, but only in quoted strings. They don't seem to have documented it on their website, but I've found it here [squarefree.com], among other places.

Google search tip: wildcard word (*)

Google treats "*" as a wildcard meaning "any word". You can use it in phrases to: Ignore unimportant words

* "all but * anything but" (vs, and)
* "shanked * jengaship" (my, your, his jengaship)

Fill in phrases where you don't know a word

* "phyllis * tam" pomona (a middle name)
* "the * family is my boss" (hard-to-understand song lyrics from a song in Office Space)

See how people have filled in expressions and jokes

* "185 * walk into a bar"
* "friends don't let friends * *" (*'s at the end just keep the phrases from being cut off in snippets.)
* "* is to * as * is to *"

Crudely "search by proximity"

* "The shareware version * 10 levels"
* "The shareware version * * 10 levels"
* "The shareware version * * * 10 levels"

It's pretty powerful, but it's only in what google calls a ``phrase search''.

What a crock of poo.

"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.

Re:What a crock of poo.

Google and other search engines don't require toolbars or software installation.

If you want to rate links you need the google toolbar.

Re:What a crock of poo.

Yeah, right, like the marketshare of FF and Safari made google what it is today.

Don't be silly, please.

Google was already the best search engine out there, and outshining Altavista (previous top-dog), before the toolbars/searchboxes even existed.

AskJeeves reads once and indexes at will

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! :)

Yes and No

Jeeves uses Googles paid advertisments, but their search engine is entirely their own. They bought the company Teoma [teoma.com], which had developed it's own competing search technology. That's what all the Jeeves properties use for search now.

Not better

"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!"

I've seen this before....

... by adding new tools for visitors to save and organize links to Web pages they find through the company's online search engine.

I liked that feature better the first time, in the original Mosaic browser, when they called it "Bookmarks."

A Younger Jeeves

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

After:
http://ask.com/ [ask.com]

Diversity is a Welcome

I'm a firm believer that we need diversity and competition in the computing world if we want to see progress. Just as it is counter-productive for MS to have a monopoly on the OS world it is undesireable to have only one search engine out there.

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.

To bloat or not to bloat...

It all comes down to whether you appreciate a clean, uncluttered interface, or if you want anything but simplicity. Google has pulled it off the best. Ask Jeeves is currently basically a lame ripoff of the Google interface, and A9 is fairly clean but there is still too much going on for my tastes. Any other major search engine has way, way too much going on. And regardless of how amazingly fast A9 works, I am certain that plain old Google will continue to be the cleanest, fastest, and most efficient search engine. My only gripe is that searching on Google is still far from intelligent.

Who?

I had never heard of Ask Jeeves until I googled for it.

Seriously

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.

Is Jeeves Gay?

Used to be that when you asked "funny" questions, you got "funny" answers. In fact, you can read the old result to this question here [ask.com]. So - they may have confused more potent technology with "growing up" in a way that Google, thankfully, has yet to do.

AJ better if implemented as advertised...

Ask Jeeves prompts the user to ask in plain language but the thing just parses out keywords and does a standard search. It doesn't interpret the intent of the question so all kinds of wierd results come back that have nothing to do with what you're looking for (just like a typical Google or Yahoo search). If it actually did try to figure out what you are really asking then it would be a lot more useful. Since it doesn't, why even pretend?

Rest of the quote

"Google is not better than us," said Jim Lanzone

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] ...we have a cartoon butler!!

so does everyone else

I remember when Google came out. Not much talk on their part about what they were going to do ... rather they just went out and kicked everyone's butt.

I'm not quite sure if this annoucement isn't just to make investors happy or to make the Ask Jeeves more 'sellable' but if search.yahoo.com couldn't wack Google, what makes AJ think they can?

Different flavors....

"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."

I prefer my Google with chocolate and sprinkles.

If your favorite search engine were a flavor, what would it be?

deifnitely !

it deifnitely appears to be a critical time for search engines.

It also deifnitely appears to be a critical time for dictionary.com.

Really?

"Looks to Outshine Google"? Well i'll be...

I wonder how much boardroom time was wasted on trying to decided whether to announce the "Outshine Google" press release or the "Continue to Be Google's Bitches" press release?

Thank god there are highly paid staff in place at Ask Jeeves who can make the right decisions for the stockholders!

I just 'Asked Jeeves' something.....

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... :)

Why is this so difficult?

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."

To outshine Google, filter Wikipedia clones

Jeeves people, read this if you want be distinguished.

One of the most infuriating things about Google is that when there is a match to a Wikipedia page, there may be dozens of Wikipedia spam clones that show up first. Besides barraging you with unwanted ads, these spam clones are often outdated, and special symbols such as in math formulas tend to be corrupted. Once you suspect your match is in Wikipedia, you often have to do a site-specific search for Wikipedia even to show up on the list.

Wikipedia is important enough that it deserves a special exception to whatever algorithm picks these spam clones first, if that's what it takes to do it. Google ignores this problem in spite of repeated complaints. Fix it, Jeeves, and I'll become a regular visitor.

Telling.

How can jeeves outshine google?

First result of Ask Jeeves: Hmm? [ask.com]

First result of Google: Ahem. [google.com]

There you have it.

Its "natural language" feature doesn't work

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.

Re:Ask Jeeves sucks

Not Flamebait. This was an old easter egg in Ask Jeeves. Doesn't work anymore though. He also used to answer "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" with "What do you mean? A European or an African swallow?"