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When I attended the Jeeves retirement party at Search Engine Strategies 2005 in NYC, I never thought that the makeover from AskJeeves.com to Ask.com would end with the site being rebranded, only a very few years later, as a women's niche search engine. Can we say floundering?

AskJeeves originally debuted as the search engine where you can literally ask Jeeves, their butler mascot, any question you wanted, in natural language. The results stunk. It didn't work. The only people who used the site were middle aged women (my mom included, as it was the only search engine she was familiar with back then, believe it or not). So off Jeeves went as the new Ask tried to compete in the big boys search engine market with Google and Yahoo!.

They should have realized that if they couldn't get it to work with married, middle aged women, it wasn't going to work on a larger market. And so off they go, yet again, to go back to their roots. As said on an , the company will concentrate "on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies and children's homework" through a "decision to cater to married women primarily living in the southern and midwestern United States".

I'm wondering if I should sell my stock in InterActiveCorp (Ask.com's parent company) before disaster strikes a third time for this company.

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Dani AI

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Short primer and context: Ask Jeeves was bought by IAC in 2005, the company officially retired the Jeeves butler and shortened the brand to Ask.com in 2006, and by 2008 the company was running ad and product experiments to reconnect with question-driven users—positioning itself around everyday, household queries (recipes, homework, hobbies) and the 35–55 family demo. (sec.gov)
(IAC acquisition: SEC S-4 filing; Jeeves retirement coverage: Wired; 2008 repositioning and ad campaign: The Guardian.)

Why that strategy was plausible — and why it looked risky: many casual searchers literally type questions (as and observed), so a product optimized for plain-English answers can be easier for that audience. Ask’s history explains the split: it started as a question/answer play but added Teoma and algorithmic ranking after 2001, so the product has oscillated between “answers first” and “scale/algorithm” strategies. Choosing a narrower demographic can increase short-term engagement but shrinks addressable ad scale. (en.wikipedia.org)
(Background on Teoma and the technical shift: Teoma / Ask history.)

Practical takeaway tied to the thread: ’s skepticism about repeated rebrands is well-founded — frequent identity shifts make it harder to build habitual use — and ’s question about whether they can “pull it off” is exactly the issue: execution, content depth, and a clear monetization path matter more than a marketing headline. Ask later doubled down on content and Q&A features rather than trying to beat Google purely on general search, showing the trade-offs of niche vs. scale. (forbes.com)
(Ask’s later refocus on answers/content: Forbes recap.)

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Member Avatar for jbennet

lol you are so correct

my mum uses ask jaeves

shes one of these people who always ask google questions instead of correct search terms

Member Avatar for UrbanKhoja

Can they really pull it off though?
They're talking about rebranding an entire company.

Member Avatar for Dani

It's going to be a trainwreck. They've rebranded the company already once a year and a half ago and are now going to do it again.

Member Avatar for acejames1

the reason they dont use google is because they cant understand a search term from a question....

QUESTION: what countrys did the romans conquer?

search term: ROMAN EMPIRE

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