Ask Jeeves Announces Series of New Products

Ask Jeeves today announced a series of new products for its flagship search engine, Ask Jeeves (www.Ask.com).

The new products include the MyJeeves personal search system, robust local search, and the next generation of its proprietary Teoma search technology. In conjunction with these announcements, the company debuted a sleeker, more contemporary Jeeves butler, whosece on Ask Jeeves.

“This launch immediately delivers a better experience for our users in several important areas, and lays the groundwork for us to fulfill our vision for search in new ways — on the Web, on the desktop, and beyond,” said Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties. “Ask Jeeves customer satisfaction is at an all time high as we continue to launch products and features that help people find, and use, information in a smarter, more intuitive way.”

MyJeeves: Your Personal Web

MyJeeves enables people as they search to create their own “Personal Web”: a compilation of search queries and search results that they can easily save, categorize into folders, annotate, and share. A free service, MyJeeves is seamlessly integrated into the Ask Jeeves search experience and does not require registration. This capability is not available on any other major search engine.

“MyJeeves saves time and minimizes frustration: It eliminates the need to repeat searches and allows users to easily find things again,” said Daniel Read, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves, Inc. “Every Ask Jeeves user can immediately take advantage of MyJeeves to begin creating their own Personal Web. Users do not need to pay a fee, install any software application, select settings and preferences, or register for anything.”

MyJeeves allows users to save search results simply by clicking a Save button located next to each search result on Ask Jeeves. Once saved, MyJeeves users can easily organize or group items into folders, print them, share them via email, and add notes to create their own descriptions of Web pages. The newly resulting list of documents is searchable within MyJeeves (distinct from the overall Web index), thus creating a personal Web index. A user’s notes about a page become searchable metadata for each page, improving relevance, especially important as an individual’s volume of saved information grows.

While not required, registration for MyJeeves provides additional advantages. Registered users can access MyJeeves from any Internet-enabled computer with a password and receive additional storage for their personal Web documents. These users also benefit from increased privacy via password protection. In addition, MyJeeves automatically saves each search query registered users execute, an option which can be toggled on or off, saving this useful data for later. Registration requires only a password and an active email address. Providing a username is optional.

“MyJeeves is an important first step in our strategy to make search more personal,” continued Read.

To learn more about MyJeeves and how easy it is to create and use your Personal Web, visit www.Ask.com and click the “Take the MyJeeves tour” link.

New and Improved Local Search

Ask Jeeves is also launching robust local search capabilities in response to the high frequency of user searches for local services and information on the site. Through a partnership with Citysearch announced in August, Ask Jeeves users now have access to comprehensive local business listings and data, including over 2 million editorial and user reviews and ratings. Collected over the last 8 years, Citysearch’s content-rich data is seamlessly integrated with other maps and driving directions.

The local search launch also debuts a local news product, powered by Topix.net. Available in the News channel of Ask.com, this new product complements other existing local features, including Weather, People Search, Movies, Time, Climate and more.

“Local is about much more than business listings,” continued Read. “We’ve combined each of these components into a tightly integrated product that delivers a local offering that rivals any product in the market.”

* Business Listings: Try “pizza in chicago”

* Local Smart Search: Try “Lexington”

* Maps: Try “maps San Francisco”

Teoma 3.0

Ask Jeeves also announces the official launch of Teoma 3.0 search technology.

Based on social networking theory, the Teoma technology takes a unique approach to relevancy ranking. Like some search engines, Teoma utilizes a form of link popularity to assist in determining relevance, but Teoma doesn’t stop there: It goes a step further to analyze each page’s reputation among experts on a given topic to determine relevancy. With this proprietary, patent-pending Subject-Specific Popularity technology, Teoma is the first and only search engine to break the Web down into topic-based “communities” of sites, and to give added credibility to those sites respected as authorities on a particular subject. Fittingly, Teoma means “expert” in Gaelic.

The first publicly disclosed upgrade to Teoma in over a year, Teoma 3.0 provides many improvements, including:

* Increased Relevance — Ask Jeeves has introduced improvements to the core Teoma algorithms, including enhanced ability to classify content in order to better assess authority.

* Improved Freshness — Teoma 3.0 provides major upgrades to the engine’s ability to return recent news and information, including daily crawls of popular, news, and other important sites. Teoma 3.0 features a newly designed architecture that will accelerate continued improvements in freshness in the months ahead.

* Expanded Index — The Teoma index has surpassed 2 billion English-only Web documents, and is expected to exceed 2.5 billion by year’s end. The new database size is determined after the removal of spam, duplicates and pornographic results.

* International — Teoma 3.0 technology supports double-byte Asian languages, enabling the recent beta launch of Ask Jeeves Japan (Ask.jp), the first non-English based Teoma index.

* Features — Teoma 3.0 will include the addition of several new features, including:

&nbsp&nbsp – Page Cache — Teoma 3.0 includes cached versions of popular sites. This feature is expected to launch in Q4.

&nbsp&nbsp – Related Search — Ask Jeeves will introduce multiple types of Related Search on Ask Jeeves, through the Teoma 3.0 technology. This feature will launch in Q4.

&nbsp&nbsp – File Types — Teoma 3.0 includes the addition of Flash and PDF files. These file types are already available on Ask Jeeves, and Ask Jeeves will, in future releases, provide the ability to restrict searches to these types of files.

“Teoma is the only search engine that can determine the authority of individual Web pages across the billions of documents on the Web. This unique capability is critical in delivering the best search results for users,” continued Lanzone. “With our new release, Teoma is emerging from its adolescence and further cementing its place as a world-class search engine, one of only three available to consumers today.”

Desktop

Ask Jeeves also confirmed today that it expects to deliver a desktop search product to the market during Q4.

Murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.