In 1996 the first advertiser-supported Ask Jeeves site was launched in Emeryville, California. The service attempts to provide information in simple question-and-answer format and avoid the Boolean strings which give thousands of matches, many specious, to users of other search engines. Using natural language processing technology and human editorial skills, the programme attempts to determine both the semantics (the meaning of the words) and syntactics (the meaning of the grammar) of each question.When asking a question the user is presented with a template list of questions which, when clicked, retrieves an answer template which contains links to the answer locations.The natural-language software has been taken up by Microsoft, Nike, British Telecom and Ford on their own sites.
The child-friendly site followed in 1998, and Ask Jeeves UK is a joint venture between Ask Jeeves Intl, Carlton Communications and Granada plc. Launched in 2000, it claims over 4.3m "unique users", making it the 5th most popular web site in the UK.
In September 2001 Ask acquired the search engine Teoma to replace results previously provided by Direct Hit. Since introducing Teoma seacrh technology, Ask Jeeves has seen a 25 percent increase in the number of times a user selects a search result on the Ask.com results page and site abandonment has also decreased by 15 percent.
UPDATE
Since January 2002 Teoma has become the third most widely used search technology used in North America, behind Google and Inktomi. Indeed much has been made of the rivalry between Teoma and Google.
In addition to Jeeves' familiar results that feature a list of questions and sponsored links, Teoma search results are featured under the heading "You may find my search results helpful." It also has a spell-checking feature that identifies misspellings and offers suggested corrections and enables searches to be done in 10 languages.
ASK JEEVES' SMART SEARCH
Launched in April 2003 the revamped search tool enables users to conduct more effective searches by helping narrow, broaden or more directly answer user queries.
www.teoma.com
www.ask.com
This article was first published on 02 May 2003 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
