Ask.com now borrows design concepts from archrival Google Inc, from which it intends to attract users to boost its search-related advertising revenue, much like the likes of AltaVista Co and Yahoo! Inc cleaned up their interfaces in response to Google.
But while the underlying Teoma technology powering Jeeves’ web search engine has not significantly changed, the Ask.com facelift is more that just cosmetic, director of product management Daniel Read told ComputerWire.
We concentrated a lot of our energies on natural language search in the past, sometimes at the expense of the search experience, Read said, adding that the move is almost the first step in a new strategy for Ask Jeeves, to deliver a more intuitive search engine.
The changes come primarily in how the Jeeves service determines relevance using not just Teoma’s algorithms, but also the various in-house and third-party indexes and databases it accesses with each search.
Often, Jeeves will attempt to deliver the user’s desired content prominently with the results, but only when the search engine is 100% sure that it knows what you’re looking for, Read said.
If the query is Britney Spears pictures, that’s what you’ll see. If the query is capital of Zimbabwe, the sentence The capital of Zimbabwe is Harare is at the top of the results page. If the query is news about Iraq, links to news stories about Iraq come first.
Jeeves partners with Moreover.com Inc for its news feed, and with Sweden-based Picsearch AB for its images database. Google, despite being a competitor, provides the keyword-linked sponsored text ads that appear on results pages.
Jeeves, which was profitable for the first time in the fourth quarter and will announce its first-quarter numbers today, also uses graphical ads linked to certain query keywords, and offers a paid-inclusion crawling service to larger web properties.
Source: Computerwire
