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Ask Jeeves Announces Series Of New Products
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
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:
- Page Cache -- Teoma 3.0 includes cached versions of popular
sites. This feature is expected to launch in Q4.
- 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.
- 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.
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