Ask Jeeves Kicks Out A Big Redesign

You know, everybody thinks it's Yahoo vs. Google, Yahoo vs. Google -- and eventually Yahoo vs. Google vs. Microsoft when they get around to jumping into the search wars. But while Google and Yahoo are slugging it out in a steel cage match, other search engines like Gigablast, Ask Jeeves, and even Vivisimo are sneaking around the ring with folding chairs...

Jeeves announced a couple things today, one a silly makeover announcement, and the other a feature anouncement of some new offerings.

Let's get the makeover announcement out of the way first. Jeeves got what's being called an "extreme makeover"; you can see the makeover picture at http://prn.newscom.com/cgi-bin/pub/s?f=PRN/prnpub&p1=20040921/SFTU045 . Eh, if you want to call that a makeover you can, but when I think about an "extreme" makover I visualize a Jeeves with a denim jacket, Jams, and hair.

But that's all right; it's not important. What's important is the new functunality offered by the search engine:

MyJeeves -- MyJeeves is in beta and is theoretically available at http://myjeeves.ask.com/ . After eighty billion "Server Busy" messages, I started getting exception report errors from Apache/Tomcat (Jeeves people, I copied the exception message. I'm sure you've gotten several copies of it by now, but in case you haven't, e-mail me.) So I'm afraid I got no review of MyJeeves.

Local Search -- Jeeves has also announced a local search. They teamed up with Citysearch in August and have over 2 million user reviews and ratings for business listings all over the country. Jeeves has also teamed up with Topix.net (congrats Rich!) When I searched the main page for [tires in Indianapolis] I got three business listings, and a link to another list of stores within 30 miles. (One of the stores had a rating, but only one.) Listings had contact information and links to maps. When I searched for [Spokane WA], I got a thumbnail map with pointers to various information, including map, jobs, current weather, offical sites, and "facts." The Facts link connects to Wikipedia. (I'm anticipating another round of arguments about online reference: don your asbestos footie PJs *now*.)

You can get to the local news search by going to Jeeves' news search ( http://news.ask.com ) and searching for a city name or zip code in the specified query box.

Teoma -- Ask Jeeves has launched "Teoma 3.0 search technology". It's described this way: "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."

I did a couple of test searches. [Paragliding] took me to an immediately useful set of search results, while [vitamins] took me to a mix of commercial and non-commercial sites. The Resources feature -- on the right side of the results page -- unfortunately hasn't changed much; lots of dupe results, not a great resource list. Teoma's new release hasn't added all its features yet. Page cache is still in the works and is expected to be added in Q4.

I have been hearing so much about the new MyJeeves I'm sorry I didn't get to try it. Maybe later on.

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