September 7, 2005

Ask Jeeves CEO Interviewed, Says Online Scams Could Slow Adoption of Personalized Search Tools

The vnunet.com article: Scams hold back personalised search, discusses how phishing and identity theft could cause problems in the adoption of personalized search tools. The article includes several comments from Ask Jeeves CEO, Steve Berkowitz.

"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," he [Berkowitz] said..."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 scams that go on and you keep reading about credit card and identity theft," said Berkowitz. "The user will benefit from the ability of the technologies to understand more about them to make search more relevant and to make information retrieval more relevant. But it will take time and probably more than people anticipate."

Berkowitz's comments come from a two-page Q&A interview that was also published today. It's titled: Ask Jeeves warms up search battle. In the interview, Berkowitz says that Ask Jeeves doesn't have a brand awareness problem.

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.

While AJ might have "80 plus per cent" brand awareness I wonder just what the people who are aware of the brand think of the brand. In other words, many people do know and recognize the name Ask Jeeves but it's been my experience, as recently as last week, that Ask Jeeves means "poor search engine" to many people. If I had got a dollar every time someone told me that eThese people need to see that Ask Jeeves 2005 is not the same search engine that it was in 1999 or 2000, I might be able to retire. Getting people to try and regularly use something new or different is a challenge all by itself but AJ's challenge is even more complex since they also need to demonstrate and show those who are already aware of the AJ brand that they've improved (understatement) their search service.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:34 PM | Permalink

July 29, 2005

MyJeeves 1.2 Released

If you're looking for something to demo this weekend, Ask Jeeves has just released version 1.2 of their MyJeeves personal information management tool.

Over on the Ask.com blog, Samuel Nunez, offers an overview and also shares a few thoughts about tagging and folksonomies.

Nunez writes: Having sat through half a dozen usability tests for MyJeeves, however, it is pretty clear to me that foldering is a more intuitive way of organizing, especially to those new to the exciting world of personal information management. Foldering may be clunky, but it's how people think - at least that's how they think today.

What's new other than a the version number? Here's a list of some of the new features.

"Tagging as Virtual Folders." That's what the Ask.com blog calls it. However, I posted that an option to "passively" add tags to each MyJeeves entry became available almost four months ago.
Tag filtering page (search all items for a particular item)
Smart tag entry field with tag suggestion drop down
New bookmarklets
Ability to upload photos from your computer or mobile device.
Tagging of images

Barry has posted a look at a few of the differences between MyJeeves and Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:30 PM | Permalink

April 21, 2005

Comparing Search History Features

With Google having released its new Google My Search History feature yesterday, I wanted to spin back around and look at where we stand in terms of search history offerings across a number of major search engines. I've done so in chart format below.

Before diving into the chart, let me stress that this isn't a "have the most features and win" contest. Some features you might not ever use. What search history features seems to work best, like the search engines themselves, may fall to your own personal decision.

Even among the editors here at Search Engine Watch, we all love different things. Personally, I find the A9 and Google tools the most compelling, because they automatically save what I'm looking for. I think it's cool that Ask, Yahoo, and A9 have categorization and annotation features in various manners, but those aren't something I expect to use myself. Others may -- and that's why it's great that they are offered.

Chris and Gary are very much into tools that save the full-text of documents and let you search against them. I'm leaving it to them to them to do a separate recap on how tools stand on that front. Gary's also playing with the Filangy, which is a closed beta, and reviewed it yesterday here. It's not on the chart below because being a closed beta, it's not something everyone can use yet.

Personally, I've loved the Google Desktop as a way to keep track of everything I've seen exactly as I saw it when visiting pages across the web. It's largely solved my own search history desires at Google, as I've written before. But the additional features from Google are definitely welcomed.

On to the chart! A guide to categories follow it below.

Feature

Ask

Eurek ster

Find ory

Furl

Google

Yahoo

Auto Save

Yes

Pause

n/a

Yes

n/a

History Search

Yes

Date Sort

Yes

Term Sort

Yes

Site Sort

Yes

Notes

Yes

April 11, 2005

Ask Jeeves Enhances MyJeeves; Tagging Option Added

Ask Jeeves has just released an upgrade to their MyJeeves personalized search tool that Ask.com launched last September.

New for MyJeeves users are several enhancements including:

+ An option to add your own "tags" to any item. To do this, save an image or web page and then click the "modify" link next to the entry on your MyJeeves "Save Results" pages. You'll then find a box labeled "tags" to add your metadata.

+ My Jeeves integration into the Ask Jeeves Toolbar. In other words, save any web page without having first find it from an AJ web results page. Big improvement! + Save images into My Jeeves from any web page (right-click) or directly from an AJ Image Search results page.

+ Important your bookmarks from IE and Firefox into MyJeeves

+ Organize your saved material into hierarchical folders.

Btw, MyJeeves is still not permanently caching pages. Other services like Filangy Nextaris, and Furl do offer a local cache option and then allow you to search the full text of these pages. I hope the next round of MyJeeves enhancements includes this feature as an option.

A tour of the new MyJeeves services is online here with more in the news release.

MyJeeves is also available from: + Ask Jeeves Spain + Ask Jeeves Japan + Ask Jeeves UK

Posted by Gary Price at 10:15 AM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

More On Ask Jeeves UK Gaining Personal Features

Gary blogged earlier about how Ask Jeeves UK has gained the My Jeeves personal features added to the main US/global Ask Jeeves site back in September. As I'm in the UK, I took a look to see how it works compared to the US side.

At either site, after you do a search, you'll see a "Save" link that appears below each listing. Click on that link, and information about the listing is saved to your "My Jeeves" area.

You can bookmark a link to this area (here's the US one; here's the UK one), or you'll find a link to it at the bottom of the Ask Jeeves home page in either country or at the top left-hand corner of search results pages. Once saved, you can search through things you've saved or organize results.

Though both Ask and Ask UK seem to offer separate personal search features, from what I can see, all information is combined. In others, if you search on Ask UK, save something, then search on Ask in the US and save something, both listings are saved in the same place. Going to MyJeeves in the US will still show UK listings you've saved and vice-versa.

The plus to this is that those who've already used the US version of Ask and saved material won't lose anything. The downside is that those who for some reason would like searches on the UK site separate from those on the US site can't do that.

For more about My Jeeves, see:

Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way from Gary looks more at how the feature operates, in terms of searching and saving.
Ask Jeeves Personal Search Goes Live from me looks at how you can use the service without registering, though you risk perhaps losing material if your cookies change.
MyJeeves FAQ has information about the service from Ask Jeeves. There's also a UK version of this FAQ, though they seem to be the same.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:45 AM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

Getting Closer to the Searcher

BBC Online takes a look at My Ask Jeeves (just launched on Jeeves UK) and Blinkx in the article: Search sites get closer to users.

"Blinkx users do not stop using other web search systems," he [Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder of Blinkx] said.

"They might use Google to look up a company, or Yahoo for travel because they know they are good at that," he said.

The variety of ways to search data was only helping users, said Mr Chandratillake and that it was likely that in the future people would use different ones for different tasks.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:21 PM | Permalink

December 5, 2004

My Ask Jeeves Comes to Jeeves UK

Ask Jeeves UK The MyAskJeeves "personal search system" is now available on the Ask Jeeves UK site.

MyAskJeeves UK offers the identical save, store, annotate, and organize services that are available on the .com site. MyAskJeeves launched in September on the .com site.

You can review what the MyAskJeeves and MyAskJeeves UK offer in our September overview: Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:33 PM | Permalink

September 21, 2004

Ask Jeeves Personal Search Goes Live

Ask Jeeves released its new personal search service today, My Jeeves, with features that let you easily track your searches over time, organize them into folders and save the sites you've visited.

Gary's got a full write-up in today's SearchDay on those features and other changes: Ask Jeeves Serves It Your Way. I wanted to add a bit more from my perspective.

The heart of both Ask's new features and those a9 rolled out last week is the ability to save what you've searched for and found. I love seeing the return of this to the major players.

Return? Yes, because MSN had exactly this type of feature back in 1999 (see my Internet Explorer 5 Makes Search Easier article). Sadly, the feature was withdrawn the following year. This was because searchers weren't making much use of it.

Why should things be any different for those searching at a9 and Ask Jeeves now? In a9's case, searches are saved automatically. That's a plus, though also worrisome. As I wrote for the Eurekster personal search launch earlier this year, having the default NOT to save searches might help preserve privacy.

Over at Ask, that's how it works. Nothing is saved unless you explicitly choose to do so. Downside? People might not make use of the feature. However, I find the little "save" links next to each description very intuitive. I think they'll catch on.

Upside? Those with search privacy worries feel better, as user testing showed Ask Jeeves.

"This comes out of consumers who thought that was icky [automatically saving things]. They said, 'Don't do that unless I tell you'," said Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves.

Keep in mind that you don't need to register to start saving things at Ask Jeeves, which is great. But this also means you'll lose data, if you delete the cookie on your computer or it is somehow otherwise corrupted. So if you really get into the search history feature, you'd better make an account.

Why has it taken so long for one of the majors to bring back saved searches? For its part, Lanzone had a pretty honest answer on behalf of Ask.

"This was the first we could actually get around to doing it as a business," he said. The company's much smaller than players like Google and Yahoo.

Lanzone also thinks the industry as a whole is evolving to catch-up with the experiment MSN initially tried.

"A few years ago people were still making the claim that as people became more mature as web users, they would use search less, because they knew the web better. The opposite has happened. As search gets better, as broadband comes in, people search more. More successful searches give you more confidence. Search is become the gateway to all that information," Lanzone said.

Search history fits into that gateway idea. It effectively grows as a permanent map to your travels across the web. It also helps the search companies in an increasingly competitive market further lock you into their services.

No doubt we'll see Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL all bring out similar search history features in the future -- or search workspace, as a good word Jeremy Zawodny's coined. Logistically, it's not hard to set these up. And competitively, it's something they'll all have to follow with.

It's also important to keep in mind that so far, "personal search" for Ask Jeeves and a9 only extends to letting you track search history, not to actually reshaping your results in the way Eurekster does.

Actual personal search, where relevancy is impacted, has yet to come to any of the major search engines as part of their regular search results (for more, see my Is It Really Personalized Search? article). Even Google's personal search remains a tucked away beta project.

Lastly, it's cool that you can search through all your favorite pages saved with Ask Jeeves. But that's not as good as being able to pick a number of entire web sites that you'd like to build a custom search around. Hopefully, one of the majors will bring this feature out. Ask itself is working on this and expect to release it in a matter of months.

Want to discuss issues raised in this post? Got a number of relevant threads in our forums for you:

Also see Gary's Don't Forget Findory post that covers some of the interesting news personalization it offers.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

Ask To Release My Jeeves Personal Search Tomorrow

It's fairly common that we and other news outlets are prebriefed about upcoming search features, agreeing to "embargo" the information until an agreed release date.

That's the case with the new personalization features that Ask Jeeves is debuting tomorrow. They're pretty cool, and Gary will have a full write-up on them when the embargo lifts.

Another publication broke that embargo today, apparently accidentally. Since the embargo was broken, we provided a few more limited details about what Ask Jeeves planned in my original blog post.

Ask was still uncomfortable about even those limited details going out. Out of courtesy to them, I've dropped a key sentence from the original post.

Along with the personalization features, Ask is also officially releasing its new Citysearch-powered local search this week (see more from Gary on this: Ask Jeeves Local: CitySearch Data Begins Appearing. Also, the Ask-owned Teoma crawler is now reported to have reached 2 billion English-language pages indexed.

Want to comment or read discussion of this topic? Please visit this thread in our forums: Ask Jeeves Adds Personal Search Features and Ask Gains Citysearch-Powered Local Search.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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