Ask Jeeves has retired the butler – Jeeves. You know, the guy who flew in the Macy’s parade, and gave the site a personalityto distinguish it from all the other search engines. Dapper old Jeeves was put out to Web 1.0 pasture where he will join the pets.com sock puppet and other icons of bygone early sites. Barry Diller accounced a re-design of the Jeeves site today and its renaming to Ask.com.
Booooooo!
The new site offers new tools like enhanced maps, driving directions, encyclopedia search and a Web-based desktop search, but no place to ask a natural language question, the hallmark of the original site. Search needs to get more simple, not more complicated!
IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also owns Ticketmaster, bought Ask Jeeves for $2.3 billion last July, indicating not soon after that the company intended to retire Jeeves — who had been based on a character in P.G. Wodehouse’s stories and novels — and shorten the site’s name, according to Associated Press. But they didn’t say they would make it bland, ugly, boring and a carbon copy of all the other Google wannabes.
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