Ya gotta love it. Someone starts a blog on a Google property to save the logo of another search engine. A former employee of “The Butler” started a blog called Save Jeeves to rescue the beloved butler character from oblivion.
IAC announced they were ditching the “AskJeeves” for just “Ask”. The site is Ask.com but Jeeves is still standing there, waiting to serve you. This blog was started on September 30 and the first entry is a doozy.
I want to save Jeeves, and I want YOUR help. You can help, by passing this link along to other Jeeves fans, or even non-Jeeves-fans who might find it informative. My hopes would be that the higher-ups in the Ask Jeeves world (and their parent company IAC) — and perhaps ultimately Barry Diller himself, will come to read this piece, and reconsider their decision.>/i>
The first portion of the blog describes his interest in protecting the character. According to the blog, the gentleman in question served Jeeves faithfully for a number of years and feels he has a vested interest in the company. He also states that he still knows a number of employees with said search engine and suggests they may feel the same way.
IAC isn’t done with Jeeves yet though. The butler can still be seen on various ads about the net and even on the Ask.com website. As this person points out, the Jeeves character is a recognizable brand, much because of the character. He goes into multiple reasons how Jeeves could be improved upon and what they could do with him.
Right now, Ask has their work cut out for them. Even though Google is the number one search engine, they rank behind Yahoo, AOL and MSN all in time spent on Google’s tools. Ask is much further behind those four. It’s losing ground. Ask may want to start working in higher relevancy searches and integrate a few tools and other features before they give up on the butler. Today is a good example. They suggested actress Teri Hatcher for image search and spelled her name wrong.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
