A party and a keynote figured prominently from Ask Jeeves at Search Engine Strategies 2005 in San Jose.

Mike McDonald of WebProNews is attending SES 2005, and reported on the opening night festivities and Tuesday’s keynote by AskJeeves.com CEO Steve Berkowitz.

After prying himself away from Yahoo’s “Search Night Off” after-party at Great America, Mike hit the Ask Jeeves gathering:

Steve Berkowitz Speaks

Mike heroically battled jet lag and the lingering, ahem, after-effects of the after-parties to attend Berkowitz’s keynote speech this morning, with Danny Sullivan handling Q&A duties.

"Ask Jeeves was left for dead after the dot com boom," Berkowitz observed. That’s an observation the business will have to battle to overcome, in the arena of public perception. He touched on the introduction of ads via an in-house developed ad placement system.

Those ads, and the search results from the engine, need to get “above the fold.” The company won’t improve its market share until it improves the user experience. Their acquisition by IAC comes into play here. IAC will focus on the advertisements: building out the ad delivery system, bringing advertisers on board. Ask will work on the search side, and Berkowitz notes the importance of integrating Teoma technology into Ask Jeeves. They’ll also work on expanding the My Jeeves feature.

The company has to build its brand, and bring on more talent to help with product development. Branding has become greatly important in the modern economy; while a name change could happen in the future, Ask Jeeves won’t do it in a way that would jeopardize brand recognition.

"So the butler is safe?" Danny Sullivan asked.

"Yes. He's just a little trimmer now,” Berkowitz replied.

What About IAC And The Fourth Network?

Berkowitz tapped the iWon site as being the “glue” to bring together the disparate IAC ventures. The iWon site, along with MyWay and Excite, has become an important brand to the company. It offers a promotional platform for the various efforts IAC and Ask will undertake to build more market share.

When Sullivan asked about the Google agreement, scheduled to end contractually in 2007, Berkowitz observed that they see that relationship continuing. The key isn’t to compete with Google, or Yahoo or MSN, but to build relationships with advertisers instead.

The “fourth network” reference is a nod to IAC head honcho Barry Diller’s previous work in establishing Fox as a fourth major TV channel. By backing Ask’s efforts with creative engineering talent and the necessary funds to further develop Ask Jeeves, Berkowitz believes they can make the search engine a valuable, viable point of presence for users of search and the advertisers who want to reach them.

In that case, perhaps iWon should go back to serving up Google search results until the butler is ready to serve up relevancy of the caliber that iWon users are accustomed to.

When the results were from Google, and they weren't narrow enough, all we had to do was put quote marks around the phrase to fix them.

Now results are nearly always irrelevant. Put quote marks around a phrase now, and the butler doesn't even seem to notice.

I've uninstalled the iWon Co-Pilot because it has become useless to me as a search tool.

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