Ask Jeeves, the question-and-answer site named after a stodgy animated butler, is the latest search engine to jump on the redesign bandwagon.
On Monday, Jeeves is launching what executives describe as one of the deepest overhauls of indexing and display in its six-year history. Eighteen months in the making, the revamp includes new features such as a picture-search function, faster page loading and tools to narrow query results.
The new look features an expanded presence for Jeeves the Butler on results pages and marks the most recent effort by a search site to keep up in a sector that is undergoing change at a pace reminiscent of the dot-com boom. Faced with competitive pressure from Google, which outranks all other search sites in popularity, rivals are rolling out a range of new bells and whistles to win users back.
Steve Berkowitz, president of Ask Jeeves, said the revamp aims to establish a reputation as a more intuitive, user-friendly search engine.
"We're definitely not trying to out-google Google," Berkowitz said. "What we're trying to do is build an experience for searchers who have a different set of needs."
As part of that plan, the redesign includes features such as question prompts that users can answer to help narrow their search. (A search on the keyword "apple," for example, triggers a prompt question asking whether you want information on the fruit or the computer company.)
In its quest to be the user-friendly search engine, however, Jeeves will be squaring off against more than Google. In the last six months, Yahoo, AltaVista, LookSmart and HotBot (owned by Terra Lycos, parent company of Wired News) have significantly restructured either the layout or backend processing of their search features in a bid to attract new searchers.
Although none of those efforts have managed to unseat Google from its throne as the most popular place on the Net to type in a keyword, Shai Thurow, author of Search Engine Visibility, is hopeful that the challengers will give the industry heavyweight something to worry about.
"It's not that I dislike Google, but the fact that it has been dominating search for quite a long time makes me a little uncomfortable," said Thurow, who regularly uses at least four search engines for online research. She believes people are best able to find information they need by exploiting the strengths of several search engines.
In the case of Ask Jeeves, which also goes by the name of Ask.com, Thurow said she most commonly uses the site to answer "how to" questions. The site, originally created as an engine for questions, contains natural-language-processing features that provide direct answers to specific queries.
The site is still best known for the question-and-answer feature, although in the last year and a half Jeeves has strengthened its traditional search offering after an acquisition of the search technology firm Teoma.
One of the benefits of heightened competition in the search arena is that query results from a broad spectrum of sites have recently gotten a lot better, said Garry Grant, chief executive of Search Engine Optimization, a search-ranking service.
"It has really reached an unsurpassed level of relevancy," Grant said. "When you type in something, the likelihood of getting back something that is relevant is over 90 percent."
Thurow believes a recent wave of acquisitions involving search-technology providers will soon result in further improvements.
Yahoo's recent redesign, for example, incorporated only part of its technological firepower. The company recently completed an acquisition of the search firm Inktomi, but has not completed the integration of its technology into the Yahoo site.
Overture, the largest provider of paid search listings, also has yet to reveal is master plan for integrating a recently announced purchase of AltaVista and its search platform, Fast.
