Ask and Jeeves answers

by Eszter Hargittai on January 30, 2005

Among other things, my research looks at how people find information online. When I conducted in-person observations of people’s information-seeking behavior on the Web, it was interesting to see how well Ask Jeeves had done in marketing itself as the search engine that answers people’s questions. Even respondents in my study who otherwise relied on Google for almost all of their queries would go to Ask Jeeves to find the answer to the question about what steps they would have to take if they lost their wallet. People would type in their query in the form of a question even though in most cases – and especially if not specified with quotes, which is something few users do – including “what” or “where” in a query does little to improve the results of a search. It was an interesting example of how a search service could position itself in the search engine market by a particular marketing approach. The results to users’ queries on that particular search engine were no better than the results offered by other services, but due to the type of question people turned to that service regardless. Now I have come across something that seems quite unique to Ask Jeeves among the most popular search engines in terms of actual services rendered, for the moment at least.

Reading the Search Engine Watch blog I found out that using Ask Jeeves can cut down on the number of clicks required to find the answers to simple factual questions. Ask Jeeves will now give you a little box with the answers to some of your questions without having to click through to one of the results for the information. For example, wondering about this year’s date for Passover, I typed in when is Passover in 2005 and was given the exact info right there by Jeeves. (Yes, of course it’s enough to type in passover 2005 to get the same result, I was just playing along.) The service seems to cater to more popular forms of information. It will give you information about some celebrity birthdays (e.g. walter matthau birthday) and the names of Academy Award winners (up until 2002 for now, e.g. academy award best actress 2002), but it won’t display the names of Nobel Prize winners directly (e.g. see results for chemistry nobel prize 2002). It will be interesting to see to what other topical domains they expand the service (some geographical information is also available this way already). For now, other search services such as Google and Yahoo require additional clicks to find answers to the above questions. Perhaps in time they will come out with their versions of instant responses.[1]

fn1. Yes, I realize that Google has been supplying answers to some questions directly for a while. That’s what Kieran relied on in this post.

{ 7 comments }

1

Fred 01.30.05 at 5:16 pm

Ask Jeeves has been offering these services long before Google, April 2003 to be precise. Also, the first online calculator was offered by AllTheWeb months prior to Google’s. Yahoo also offers many shortcuts.
This post has a Google overview.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041112-191257

2

Gary Price 01.30.05 at 5:30 pm

E-
Our ResourceShelf.com blog has been tracking this kind of question answering services since back in 2003.

3

eudoxis 01.30.05 at 5:30 pm

Are you saying that AskJeeves, contrary to marketing claims, does not use context filtering?

4

Gary Price 01.30.05 at 5:47 pm

Ask Jeeves long abandonded the notion of using human to pre-build question and answer sets. Most of what’s being know is done through mining specialized databases (IMDB.com, Who2.com as examples).

“We’re built to scale Smart Search with others people’s data.”–Jim Lanzone, VP at Jeeves
From:
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3370751

Also, the underlying database, ranking algorithm, etc AJ uses comes from its Teoma technology.

5

Janet H. Austin 01.30.05 at 7:26 pm

I prefer Dogpile.com as a multiple search engine,which uses Google as well as several other of the so-called hot searchers.Saves time and effort.As a mentor of mine said,”work smart;not hard.”

6

Gary Price 01.30.05 at 9:06 pm

Janet:
I would suggest taking a look at Clusty.com.
http://www.clusty.com

Not only useful results from multiple engine but dynamic clustering that can not only save you time but it can also expose results you might not see in a regular set of results. In some ways, the clusters are knowledge discovery tools.

Also, Clusty.com offers a feature not seen elsewhere.
Next to each result look for a magnifying glass icon. Click it and a “live version” of the results page is embedded into the results list. More useful (IMHO) than an old static image.

Btw, if you think the results from one engine to the next are the same? Run some searches with Jux2.com and you’ll see that search engine overlap isn’t as great isn’t as many think.
http://www.jux2.com

7

InnaBar 01.31.05 at 4:08 am

This post brought back some memories – when I first took Eszter’s survey, I also immediately turned to Jeeves on the wallet question, even though I have NEVER used Ask Jeeves before. And I would have never thought myself susceptible to pure marketing techniques on the part of the search engines (considering I actually understood why Google’s search algorithm was superior at the time:)

Also, I was wondering whether Ask Jeeves performs any search query parsing beyond filtering out keywords from the questions, and it seems that they do. For example, queries “What is Purim” and “When is Purim” generate different and useful responses. I do wonder how much of that is automated and generalized – in other words, is there an editor at Ask Jeeves who prepared the content for the these two arguably common queries, or was this generated on the fly?

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