Appparently, Barry Diller (owner of IAC and recent acquiree of AskJeeves), has decided to drop the butler (Jeeves) from the Ask property. My personal view is that this is a miserably ill-thought-out move. My reasons are:
- Jeeves is associated in the minds of consumers with Ask.com - in a totally non-scientific study, I asked 6 people in our office building if they were familiar with the search engine Ask.com... Not one yes. Then I said - "Ask Jeeves? With the butler guy." Much better success - 4 of 6 knew about it.
- Jeeves is THE branding element. Without him, you've got no "unique value proposition". He represents the so-called "natural language capabilities" of the engine; lose him and you're just another web search engine.
- If it ain't broke... Jeeves hasn't hurt the company, he's only helped - his clever antics on days like Pirate day give the search engine personality, links and traffic it wouldn't ordinarily garner.
- Dollars to donuts says Jeeves' loss will mean that Ask's search and traffic numbers are down in 6 months. Even a clever new ad campaign and re-branding can't save them now.
Does anyone in the community actually think that Diller made the right move?
Jeeves hasn't done a thing to increase market share over time, not even enough for SEOs to begin to think about targeting the engine for traffic, so I can't agree that it's a bad move. Here's how I saw Jeeves a couple of years ago
https://www.webmasterworld.com/forum2/408.htm
I haven't changed my mind. Jeeves is the wrong packaging for the product.
They've got a great technology with some brilliant people behind it, and if a branding change can get them the eyeballs they deserve, then I'm all for it.
Removing Jeeves is symptomatic of a broader range of efforts to "trim the fat" at Ask.com and get things in gear for the search engine to gain market share. I'd say that considering how "visible" Ask.com really is, they should be able to create / mold a new brand identity that highlights their QA formula of search.
Of course, they could also go down the hill, but then that would have happened even with Jeeves around considering how aggressive the Big 3 have been recently.
Well, I beg to differ. Strategy is thinking about the long term. Jeeves is the packaging but the real engine is that great domain Ask.com. Google and the others have suckered us into accepting we've got to do keyword searches. The Teoma technology provides a great engine to provide answers to questions and even give results in terms of clusters to help you move forwards, if you haven't yet got quite the final answer. By promoting ASK as THE WAY to answer your questions, I think they have a USP (Unique Selling Proposition).