Jeeves Gets a New Bertie, Named Barry

As everybody and their cat has heard by now, Ask Jeeves ( http://www.ask.com ) has been bought. And who has bought them? Why, none other than InterActive Corp., headed by Barry Diller. IAC already owns a bunch of Internet properties you may be aware of, including Evite, Expedia, Domania, and CitySearch.

IAC got Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion in stock. And what did they get for that? According to their announcement of the acquisition (available at http://www.iac.com/index/news/press/IAC/show_pr?objId=7278 ), they get a web search for their entire network of IAC sites, a search engine that's often included with Yahoo, Google, and MSN (as I mentioned when covering Chris Sherman's talk last week), and a leg up into the text advertising in search engines industry. Sounds like quite a nice deal to me!

There have been times in Ask Jeeves' history when I have wondered, "WTF?" but they have really pulled it together in the last 18 months or so. I saw them present at Web Search University and they did an excellent overview of some their recent offerings.

I hope IAC just lets them go and keep doing what they've been doing in the past several months. They're doing a good job of competing, and the acquisition of Bloglines wasn't bad. I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

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