The company's acquisition of Interactive Search Holdings, which closed May 6, doubled its share of the search market to 7 percent...
The key to Ask Jeeves' position in the competitive search market, its executives say, is that it owns its search technology. Unlike MSN, which is building algorithmic search capability, and AOL, which relies on Google, Ask Jeeves has Teoma, a Web search technology it bought for a bargain-basement price of $4.5 million in September 2001, well before the search boom.
"Index search is the great differentiator in the opportunity for value creation in this space," Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowitz said in a conference call after closing the ISH acquisition.
Unlike Google, which determines search results based on link popularity, Teoma takes a community approach, judging relevance based on authorities it ties to subjects. By combining Teoma with its own roots in natural-language search, Ask Jeeves has been a leader in directly returning information to user queries through its Smart Search initiative.
With Smart Search, a query for "capital of Latvia" yields "Riga" and one for "weather in San Francisco" returns a forecast, in lieu of an index of Web pages. Ask Jeeves executives bank on steps like these to expand its search market share at the expense of rivals"
posted by Jen @ 8:35 AM
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