Ask Jeeves warms up search battle

Ask Jeeves is preparing an assult on the global search engine industry in a bid to achieve double digit market share by stealing users from the current leaders Google, MSN and Yahoo.

In addition to launching new products and services in existing markets in North America and the UK this Autumn, the search engine plans to expand across Europe, including France, Spain and Germany, chief executive officer Steve Berkowitz told vnunet.com in an interview.

In market share listings for online search engines, Ask.com consistently ranks towards the bottom of the heap with a single digit share. In its most recent ranking, research firm ComScore put Ask Jeeves in fourth place with a 6.1 per cent market share among US users, trailing far behind Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Still Ask argues that it deserves a place among its three larger competitors because the company owns its own Teoma search technology, allowing it to processes search queries that present web users with results that they cannot get anywhere else.

The company in July also finalised its acquisition by IAC/Interactive Corp, a multi billion dollar online powerhouse that attracts about 44 million web visitors with its portfolio of websites ranging from Evite to Match.com, Ticketmaster and Citysearch.

What's Ask Jeeves' place in the world?

Our focus is around search, search-related technologies and search related innovation. We’re going to continue to innovate around the core, which is around correlativity or features like related names and zoom in and zoom out, those are things that we just launched. 

Now with the acquisition by IAC we’ll hopefully continue to do that and accelerate those though our ability to work with companies like Citysearch to bring real local content. We had a relationship with them before the acquisition, but it will be a much deeper relationship in the coming months and year.

We can now have a relationship with Ticketmaster and have the ability to bring ticketing information directly to search users, the ability to combine with companies like match.com and HSN as well as some of the Expedia companies like TripAdvisor.

When can we expect to see more results from the acquisition by IAC?

We put search boxes on a lot of IAC sites because that was a quick thing. In general we’re just in the early stages of looking at different things. The biggest change that users see today is that we made the change to fewer ads.

We just closed the deal on July 19th. As we move forward we’ll be spending time to understand better how to integrate the content. Those are the things that we'll be doing over the course of the next six to 12 months.

Will Ask Jeeves shine by being the glue across the IAC portfolio?

No, I think we’re going to shine in search. The other benefits from IAC are just benefits that come by being a part of a bigger company with access to another 44m end users. It doesn't just give us the ability to put search boxes across their sites and to integrate content.

As [IAC chief executive] Barry [Diller] has said, it really is about search. How we build great search is really what’s going to make the businesses work together. Natural law will give us the opportunity to find how those relationships work outside of the core search.

We had the product, we had the people, we now have the resources. It’s a matter of execution. We’ve out-executed our competitors, we need to now take that to the next level.

ComScore puts you at 6.1 per cent of overall search queries. Is that something that you’re aiming for?

We have been gaining ground if you look at the first six months of the year. We went from an overall 5.1 per cent market share to about 6 per cent. I’d love to see us in the next in the next years getting to double-digit market share.

What is going to drive that growth?

We’ve always had a history on Ask.com of being a highly monetised [heavy on advertisments] site. We would show 10 links in commercial categories 10 spots of listings. We’ve now moved to what we believe is the industry's leading monetisation. We’re always showing three links above the fold. That means that when you come to Ask.com and you type in a query, the maximum number of commercial links that you’re going to see is three because the graphical ad has gone away on September 1.

If you were to go to Google for example, you’ll see three links above the fold, and you’ll also see four or five down the right rail. On our site now you’re only going to see three links.

We believe that our challenge has always been building the frequency and the retention of our users. The amount of monetisation has been holding us back. We’ve made that change effective August 4th.

That will be a big driver of our market share because we have a significantly higher percentage of unique users [than ComScore's 6.1 per cent]. Overall I think we have 16 plus per cent of the users in search, they just don’t use us frequently enough and if we can increase the frequency at use, we will gain share. It’s not even about attracting new users, which we’re doing very well, but it’s about getting users to use us more often. 

Would you agree that name recognition with the general consumer is one of Ask's larger problems at this moment?

I would say that Ask Jeeves doesn’t have name recognition problem. We have 80 plus per cent aided brand awareness and probably 30 per cent to 40 per cent unaided brand awareness at this point in time.

Our growth potential is greater than anybody else’s, because people know us. They just don’t know why we'd like them to get to us. Which is: come to Ask and have any of your questions answered, but also it is a great place to search.

We’re just slowly but surely starting to move back into the world of real marketing. We had a great first half of the year in terms of the response for our marketing, so you’ll see us do more of that in the fall, and more of that down in 2006. 

What about international markets?

We’re in a process of putting together the assets for a launch in multiple countries. That'll be a big 2006 issue for us. We'll be moving into Spain and some other countries by the end of the year, as well as Germany and France.

We’re very, very strong in the UK. It’s a part of our growth plan, and I think that’s where we can gain a lot of market share all the time because in those markets Google is even more dominant than in the US and people are looking for choice. We believe that there’s a real opportunity for us to become a strong player in Europe as and that will be our first focus. 

There’s a lot of talk about personalised search these days, especially with the Google search history, My Yahoo and My Jeeves. If you close your eyes and envision personalised search a few years from now, what is it going to look like for end users?

I think it’s going to take a lot of time before users are going to trust putting a lot of information into the computer, when there are just a lot of scams. You keep reading about credit card and identity theft. Users think: 'I don’t need that.'

The user will benefit from the technology's ability to better understand them and make search and information retrieval more relevant. The user will benefit, but it will take time and probably more than people anticipate.

Remember, we all talk about broadband but many people still are on dialup and so it will take a long time for the market place get to where we all like it to be.

The benefits to the user will be incredible, but whether the user will allow those benefits to happen over time is something that we have to wait and see. But the ability to offer personalisation just isn’t about giving me all your personal information.

Personalisation is about understanding geographically where you are, what your interests are, what you searched for in your last session.

Personalisation has lots of different characteristics to it and it will be the core part of the ability for users to get better information retrieval. Bloglines is a great example of personalisation, without personalising, right. Because you’re subscribing to a certain RSS feed, by doing that we understand what information to push to you. That’s not really personalisation because you’re not giving us any personal information. I consider that personalised information delivery.