Ask Jeeves making headlines

• May. 29, 2003

One of the things I do to keep up on things it subscribe to news services providing search engine news headlines.

Imagine my surprise when I came in to work this morning and saw no less than 5 emails from the news services all talking about things Ask Jeeves has done in the past 24-48 hours.

The first headline I received reads "Ask Jeeves shares jump as analysts cite growth." This was nothing surprising to me, as I also watch the markets on the engines to see what they are doing.  In the last few days all the major engines have been up slightly.

I started to do more checking to see why this was newsworthy when, about 10 minutes later, I received another email proclaiming "Ask Jeeves to sells unit, raise $100 million." It seems that Ask Jeeves has sold its enterprise search features, therefore they now have money to spend.

Ok, this is starting to pique my interests.  Although most SEO's don't consider Ask Jeeves as a "serious player" as they only generate about 10% of total search engine traffic, giving them a number 5 on our list of top 10 engines.  I still like to watch them as I think they have something up their sleeves.   After all, they have made a couple pretty serious changes in the past few weeks, dumping one of their partners, E-spotting in the UK in favor of Google.  They also recently won a contract to supply enterprise search to Washington DC.

So, considering that their share prices have been rising, and now that they freed up another $100 million in cash, the only next logical explanation comes in the form of another news headline 2 hours later:  "Ask Jeeves rekindles Web-search merger talk."

So I'm sitting here thinking how does one of the minor search engine players all of a sudden put themselves in the enviable position of being able to acquire one of their competitors?  Sure they couldn't afford the like of Yahoo, or Overture, and Google isn't even on the market, but there are others.

Others, like Looksmart who is currently worth about $250 million.  Sure it appears that Ask Jeeves only has about half that, but I'm sure it wouldn't take much to raise the additional funding. By acquiring Looksmart, Ask would increase their customer base, as well as the product offerings they have.

They currently own Teoma, which is a paid inclusion engine, and Looksmart would add the PPC component which would help drive revenues.  Plus they recently completed a major upgrade to their engine, improving relevance and returning results faster.

This all bodes well for Ask Jeeves who could still turn out to be a major player in the search game if they play their cards right.

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists