Send Jeeves to Space
Sadly, Jeeves is being retired from www.ask.com. After years of faithful service to the [mediocre] search engine, he is putting off to greener pastures. You can bid adieu and vote for his next adventures at http://www.jeevesretirement.com/desk/. I’m voting for space, for no good reason. You can read more here and here.
The natural question to ask is, what will the new version of Ask be like? No news yet, although it will probably maintain its strong consumer focus either by design or the habit of its users. However, it would be nice to see changes that try to gain significant market share and stir up the search pot a bit. Google is a strong innovator that doesn’t need much of a push, but Yahoo!’s recent acknowledgement that search alone is not their highest priority suggests that a nudge from smaller players could refocus their innovative efforts. What I would really like to see is more real competition for Overture / Yahoo! Sponsored Search, a service whose functionality (or lack thereof) and management console have changed very little over the last couple of years. Overture / YSS only gets my nod as a necessary evil because of its market reach; it’s terrible to work with.
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