The future of Ask Jeeves is still largely up in the air. Though it trails quite far behind its major competitors, the arguably 4th most popular search engine is actively paving its own road through technology, advertising, and widescale integration of complementary services, making it a major player in search, more potential than kinetic at this point, and different.
In an interview with vnunet.com, Ask CEO Steve Berkowitz, shed some light on the future of his company and the niche they’re trying carve out.
In mid-July, Ask found itself in the arms of Interactive Corp, adding the search engine to a family that includes Evite, Match.com, Ticketmaster and Citysearch, and Berkowitz has every intention of utilizing the new resources to bolster Ask’s search experience. Within the year, says Berkowitz, we’ll see an integration of content across the board.
That integration seems to be a ticket to paring down sponsored search results at Ask Jeeves, allowing the search engine to be more pureform.
“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,” said Berkowitz.
Of course, once a more ubiquitous Ask Jeeves is around, those three comercial links will become prime real estate, especially as Berkowitz and company focus more on Europe and less in the United States. 2006 will see a major launch in Spain, Germany, France, and the UK.
“I think that’s [Europe] 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,” predicted the CEO.
Upping their search market share from 6.1% won’t come overnight, however. As MyJeeves personalized search integrates with the rest of the corporate strategy, the company will have to build trust among consumers, and that takes time-and real world marketing.
“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.”
Whatever happens, we’re sure to see a very different search engine with a different approach than Google and Yahoo!. Rather than, like the top three contenders who consistently cannibalize each other, Ask Jeeves is forging its path to becoming an interesting alternative.
