Ask Jeeves Launches (Beta) German Site
It’s official, but not a total surprise, since Barry first blogged reports about new European versions of Ask Jeeves appearing throughout Western Europe last month.
Today, Ask Jeeves has “officially” released Ask Germany (Deutschland) in beta.
You’ll quickly spot an image of Mr. Jeeves on the home page but the service makes no other mention of the butler except this page with a history of the character.
Many of Ask’s features available elsewhere are available on the German site including the binoculars feature, cached pages (with a date and time stamp), My Jeeves, and direct access to the German interface to Bloglines that also lists the number of unread messages in your Bloglines account on the AJ Deutschland home page.
Ask Jeeves Deutschland also offers an image search database and web page translation.
The main search box on the home page offer options to search only pages from Germany, only German language pages, or the entire web. This preferences page allows the user to change the number of results on a search results page and to activate the Internet filter. More about AJ Deutschland here. I was unable to spot an advanced interface page.
The official news release is here.
Germany has the greatest number of Internet users in Europe, with more than 42 million people online, and we believe it will be a very important market for the growth of Ask search technology and the Ask brand,” said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Last March, AJ/Ask launched Ask Jeeves in Spain and in 2004 Ask Jeeves in Japan. Btw, AJ is also testing their own Bloglines blog/feed search engine in Japan.
Finally, the SER post from December points to more European versions of AJ that haven’t been officially released including Ask France and Ask Netherlands.