On Search Engines and Jeeves.

How sad.

Ask.com, which used to be known and have the URL of askjeeves.com is jettisoning it’s Butler mascot, Jeeves. The press coverages suggest this should be from "next Monday" but on going there now, you will find Jeeves no longer exists. All gone, done, walked off the building. Hasta la vista, Jeeves. And this, only after Jeeves underwent a change in image himself in September last year - when he disappeared for a week and came back as a new man. Perhaps that should have given him some indication of his potential no-future. Going through a mid-life crisis like that is never thought well of by one’s employers.

The writing was on the wall even before this (August 2005) when Jeeves was not invited to appear in advertising, but just sit on the homepage. From that press release, the following quote -

The butler isn’t retiring — he remains prominently featured on Ask Jeeves’ (ASKJ) website. But by keeping Jeeves the butler out of the ads, the company is hoping consumers will visit the site to try to find him.

Oh Jeeves, Jeeves - you should have seen it coming.

The ask metaphor or pretense always annoyed me anyway - having to type in a whole question, when in reality some simple key word searches would do the trick. But at least the Butler made it more plausible. I just always think it’s a little sad when an icon is dismissed after so many years for the sake of a so-called image change. Perhaps that comes with age - and that dooming feeling that with time, I too may be retired out.

But with Google going all out to do everything else (blog communities, groups, products like Google Earth…) then perhaps it is time for Ask.com to highlight it’s one main function - a search engine. To do this, apparently all the adverts found on the page are going also. That will be good.

I often wonder what is happening with Alta Vista also - this search engine provides a really good image search also - behind that of Google Images. And for a scrapper into altered projects, image searches are the most important to me in all of this.

My top searches are done through - in this order -

1. Google (90% success)
2. Yahoo - the yahoo and google search bars are shoved out at you by many other downloaded products, your Internet Service Provider, and Internet Explorer / Mozilla and other browsers. You can’t get away from them.
3. Alta Vista
4. Very seldom - Ask.com.

Maybe this might change if ask.com gets modern, despite my sympathy for the retired Jeeves.

(sidenote: I hadn’t realised the relationship here, but the new Ask.com frontpage lists categories for search, including Bloglines. Ask.com has an association with Bloglines)