With the farewell to Jeeves festivities taking place today at Search Engine Strategies, Ask.com has gone live today with its new name and look.
Gone is the familiar butler, although the color scheme is the same and most of the page elements remain. The one major difference: On the right side, there is a collapsible box with links to multiple services, including:
- Image search
- News
- Maps and Directions
- Local search
- Weather
- Encyclopedia
- Shopping
- Desktop search
- Bloglines
According to the AP, the makeover will be accompanied by an ad blitz in March, as well as several new features, like the new mapping service which provides both driving and walking directions.
Despite its recent progress, Ask.com still lags a distant fifth in the battle for search engine supremacy. Through December, Google led the pack with a 40% U.S. market share, followed by Yahoo at 29.5%, MSN at 24.3%, AOL at 8.5% and then Ask.com, Media Metrix said.
Berkowitz believes Ask.com’s latest changes will help boost its market share above 10% to surpass AOL before setting its sights on MSN and Yahoo. While catching Google probably isn’t realistic, Berkowitz and Lanzone hope people begin to realize Ask.com is the only other large website besides Google primarily focused on search.
Ask has also retired the Teoma brand. Its search technology will now be called ExpertRank, and Teoma.com will redirect to search.ask.com.
Barry Diller’s SES New York keynote is starting now (I’m there), and you can listen live at WebMasterRadio.FM.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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