Live Q&A Session with Jim Lanzone, VP of Ask Jeeves Options

We have the privilege to have a live question and answer session with Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President, Search Properties at Ask Jeeves.

So go ahead and ask your questions now. Jim will be popping in and out answering your questions, starting Sunday or Monday. Please be kind.

Thank you indeed for giving us this opportunity and welcome to the Forums.

I believe you are likely to be retiring Jeeves and putting the effort behind the ASK name, for which you already have the domain. My favourite mantra is 'Focus, Focus, Focus' so I heartily applaud this move. Presumably the Teoma 'brand' would become absorbed within the new entity.

I've always had a problem with the multi-brand strategy that your company has adopted. Of course you should never kill off cash cows that are making good money, but you could put all the emphasis on ASK and let it gradually take over.

There may be limits on what you wish to divulge since the competition is probably watching. However is there any second thinking about the multi-brand strategy?

Jim,

First let me say that I really appreciate you taking the time to speak openly with all of us.

My question focuses on Ask's use of "nofollow". When I was in NYC for SES, I had heard from the Ask representative (I believe it was Rahul Lahiri) that Ask ignores the "nofollow" attribute in links. Earlier this month, however, I was on a panel with Keith Hogan (also of Ask) who I recall interjected at one point that Ask does do "something" with the "nofollow" tag on links.

Could you clear up Ask/Teoma's position on how this is used?

Thanks much!

Thanks, Jim.

It's a real pleasure to have you join us.

We've seen Ask grow over the past few years with the addition of other web properties. These include companies like DirectHit, Octopus Software, eTour, Teoma, Interactive Search Holding (Excite, MyWay, Iwon,etc.), and Bloglines.

I'm sure that the addition of each has seen its share of challenges, benefits, and risks. We know from your official Bio that you were originally with eTour.

Can you tell us a little about some of the operational challenges Ask faced in bringing some of these companies together? Things like different privacy policies on web sites, and company policies towards employees and customers, bringing together employees in different parts of the country, and so on.

Some of the benefits that they have brought to Ask?

Of course, I'm also going to ask about some of the risks, for instance, some of the recent online conversations about Ask Toolbars have had people questioning the lack of consent in downloads of that software.

Thanks.

Jim,

It is great of you to agree to stop by cre8! Two questions:

Are there any plans to offer free web based email and IM from the Ask.com site?

Nice weekend to visit us, Jim.

John Battelle just wrote about some new functionality from Ask on his blog: Ask Launches New Zoom and Answering Services. There are some comments there, including one from Dr. Jakob Nielson, and a response from you.

We look at a lot of usability issues over here in addition to Search Issues. I'm sure a lot of our visitors would like to hear a little more about the usability testing that was done to come up with where you place the features on the pages. It sounds like some eyetracking was done. Any other methods? Did the usability testing play a part in the decision to highlight answers in addition to query terms?

Again, thanks.

Hey everyone. I'm getting the kids in the car to take off for the weekend (my wife is telling me to get off the computer...can anyone relate?) but as Rusty said I will be checking in and answering your questions all weekend, though more so on Monday than let's say tonight or tomorrow. I really appreciate everyone taking the time and promise to get to all of them in some way, shape or form.

Jim

ps - Barry you look so tough in that pic, like you could really hurt me if you wanted to. Can you take one of me like that at SES?

Hi, I relate, have a good time, look forward to the future posts

bp

Hi Jim,

As always to new visitors; welcome to the forum! Good to have you over.

As mentioned, Ask acquired quite a lot of property. From my point of view the most interesting one has been Bloglines. Together with the Ask toolbar it suggests to me that Ask could go after the individual consumer more and more.

Is Ask working towards, or planning to, pervading the individual consumer world by offering non-search related tools which will be used on a regular basis?

Hi Jim and everybody,

It's nice of you to be here. Your presence has motivated me to register to Cre8asite and participate for the first time although I have visited these forums dozens of times before and read many discussions.

I'll get right to the question.. One of my sites used to be listed in Ask Jeeves / Teoma engines in the times that paid inclusion was still there. I remember paying for 3 or 4 pages to be included which got those pages listed right away. After a while your crawler found my entire site and the rest of its pages were also included in your index.

After paid inclusion seized to exist my site was still fully crawled and listed in both Ask and Teoma for several months. One day my domain completely disappeared from your results. It seems to me that for some reason it was blacklisted. Until today my site is not listed at Ask / Teoma. I find it odd since my site is quite popular and it shows thousands of backlinks in other major search engines.

I tried sending several emails to Ask.com contacts but never received an answer. I will very much appreciate it if you could assist me in getting my site listed again in your index or at least help me get the answers as to why it was banned.

10x.

rbester

ps - Barry you look so tough in that pic, like you could really hurt me if you wanted to. Can you take one of me like that at SES?

I took that picture when I was dissatisfied by the quality of search results at a competitor of yours.

I am told that Jim should be here shortly. Some time this afternoon (Monday), I like PST time.

I've always had a problem with the multi-brand strategy that your company has adopted. Of course you should never kill off cash cows that are making good money, but you could put all the emphasis on ASK and let it gradually take over.  

There may be limits on what you wish to divulge since the competition is probably watching. However is there any second thinking about the multi-brand strategy

Barry: I can't make any comments on our future plans right now, but let me make a few general comments.

Focus is right, absolutely. But I disagree that a multi-brand strategy means lack of focus for a company and inherently causes confusion for consumers. A multi-brand strategy can be an asset if operated the right way: unique value propositions and unique targets. It can be a strength precisely because you aren’t restricted, in consumers minds, by the meaning of a single brand, so the individual brands can become stronger in their markets.

Our CEO, Steve Berkowitz, was previously president of a very successful company – IDG Books – that owned multiple brands like Dummies, Cliff Notes and Frommers. Initially, it was just Dummies. When he acquired Cliff Notes and Frommers, he didn’t merge them and call them Dummies Bookcheats and Dummies Travel, because they had a history and meaning for consumers that were distinct from Dummies. I can think of tons of similar examples, like Nike didn’t turn Cole Haan into Nike DressUp (DebonAir?).

As with most things, I think it depends on the situation. Combining companies. Combining products or services. Launching new products. Launching brand extensions. In this instance, what you’re recommending – consolidation of previously existing brands – depends on many of the factors I mentioned above, like value proposition and history. Ask Jeeves and iWon are very different. HotJobs isn't really known as Yahoo Jobs. Meanwhile, it made sense to merge the Overture and Inktomi brands into Yahoo because they were essentially in the same space as the Yahoo brand.

As for the Ask Jeeves vs. Ask.com debate, that’s still speculation at this point and Mr. Diller's comments included saying he wasn't sure what the outcome would be. I can say that as a standalone company, the Jeeves character was a valuable asset for brand recognition, especially when we were low on marketing dollars. With more resources, we’ll put our best foot forward as we seek to gain market share against GYM, whatever brand or brands that requires. I will say there have been a lot of interesting blog comments on the topic. What do you guys think?

Can you tell us a little about some of the operational challenges Ask faced in bringing some of these companies together? Things like different privacy policies on web sites, and company policies towards employees and customers, bringing together employees in different parts of the country, and so on.  

Some of the benefits that they have brought to Ask?

Bill:

Well, for starters, Steve Berkowitz has done so many acquisitions in his career that, from Teoma to ISH, the acquisitions he’s made at Ask Jeeves have been integrated very, very smoothly from a corporate perspective. We’ve hardly missed a beat.

Operationally, one reason these acquisitions went so well is because most brought something unique to the table. Teoma brought world-class search technology. Tukaroo brought Desktop Search. Bloglines brought the ability to "search, publish, share and subscribe" to blogs and newsfeeds. ISH itself is a massive business in its own right with Smiley Central, iWon, Excite, etc.

In other cases, we might not have made a business of the technology we acquired, but we got some great people who became part of the second generation of Ask Jeeves. Octopus is a good example. We still own the technology, which is very cool, but even more important was the team. They wound up building things like MyJeeves. And their head of technology, Tuoc Luong, is now the EVP of Technology for our whole company. We still have some great people from Direct Hit. And the eTour people weren't so bad either.

Meanwhile, the biggest operational challenge was distance. We wound up with employees all over the country. That took some getting used to, but it turned out to be a positive. Once we got used to working virutally, including a lot of video conferences, it wasn't a problem. And as a company we became location agnostic which has allowed us to hire and retain some important people.

It is great of you to agree to stop by cre8! Two questions:  

Are there any plans to offer free web based email and IM from the Ask.com site?

Brad: Do you want us to offer them?

We have no plans to announce. I will say that we have developed an incredibly creative team the past few years, and we have ideas in just about every area of information retrieval and management you can think of. We don’t want to spaz out and just turn out product after product just to get headlines, nor do we want to offer something that isn’t an improvement over the status quo (e.g., email just for the sake of it). But where it makes strategic sense, and we can meet user needs, we will play in our own unique way.

John Battelle just wrote about some new functionality from Ask on his blog: Ask Launches New Zoom and Answering Services. There are some comments there, including one from Dr. Jakob Nielson, and a response from you.  

We look at a lot of usability issues over here in addition to Search Issues. I'm sure a lot of our visitors would like to hear a little more about the usability testing that was done to come up with where you place the features on the pages. It sounds like some eyetracking was done. Any other methods? Did the usability testing play a part in the decision to highlight answers in addition to query terms?

Bill:

We have always tried to get deep into consumer research, both talking to consumers and in analyzing data and site usage. With consumers, we do everything from basic usability lab to going into people's homes for ethnography studies. And yes, we do eyetracking studies.

Zoom is a good example of fusing several of these bits of research together. We knew from internal data that our old clustering technology, called Related Topics, was our #1 most used feature (aside from web search) for the past three years. We learned why through research: most people do not use advanced search or tabs. That white box is sooooooo easy to get started with, people will make the tradeoff every time and just enter something to get going. This leads to iteration: if someone's initial search is off base, they will simply try again. Related Topics was the way they iterated.

Eyetracking was also revealing. We found that the right side of the page, where our competitors have ads, is a natural "next steps" location for searchers. They evaluate a search results page in an "F" pattern. First down the left side for their results, then to the upper right to iterate if they dont find what they want the first time.

So, we determined both to build the next generation of Related Topics, called Zoom, and to leave Zoom in place in the upper right part of the page. Feedback has been amazing. People love Zooming.

And since you mentioned it, yes, usability played a HUGE part in deciding to highlight answers rather than query terms in the Web Answers product. We found in usability that many people skipped over direct answers placed above the 10 blue links, and automatically headed straight to the 10 blue links for their "answer." So we came up with this UI treatment. In usability, people consistently said, "There. That's the answer right there." They found it every time. We then A/B tested it live on the site, and found that the product improved click-through rate on our top result by over 200%. We knew we had a winner.

As mentioned, Ask acquired quite a lot of property. From my point of view the most interesting one has been Bloglines. Together with the Ask toolbar it suggests to me that Ask could go after the individual consumer more and more.  

Is Ask working towards, or planning to, pervading the individual consumer world by offering non-search related tools which will be used on a regular basis?

Ruud: Everything we do is geared towards finding and managing information. As I say in this post on SearchViews, http://searchviews.com/archives/2005/05/5_...tions_wit_3.php I view Bloglines as the yin to search's yang. You find it with search, you manage and track it with a service like Bloglines or MyJeeves. Since we were committed to that vision, it made sense to acquire the site, technology and team behind the #1 service in that space. Without being specific for our other plans, I'll just say that we think search is the natural hub for a lot of things. But make no mistake, it all starts with search, and we're not going to take our eye off the ball there. In fact, our biggest innovations recently, from Zoom to Web Answers to Image Search, have been at the core of what we do.

After paid inclusion seized to exist my site was still fully crawled and listed in both Ask and Teoma for several months. One day my domain completely disappeared from your results. It seems to me that for some reason it was blacklisted. Until today my site is not listed at Ask / Teoma. I find it odd since my site is quite popular and it shows thousands of backlinks in other major search engines.

Rbester: What is your site/domain? Just tell us what the site is and we can talk.

My question focuses on Ask's use of \"nofollow\". When I was in NYC for SES, I had heard from the Ask representative (I believe it was Rahul Lahiri) that Ask ignores the \"nofollow\" attribute in links. Earlier this month, however, I was on a panel with Keith Hogan (also of Ask) who I recall interjected at one point that Ask does do \"something\" with the \"nofollow\" tag on links.

Randfish: I'm going to have Rahul or Keith post on this themselves. Maybe they can duke it out.

Jim, thanks for those very complete answers. In one fell swoop, you seem to have answered all the questions and put the ball back in our court.

Any comment on rumors on a project called 'Red Carpet'... that could be a comparison shopping engine for IAC and AskJ...?

Thank you Jim, or shall I say, Mr. Gates.

I really appreciate you taking the time to answer these questions, as do the rest of the members.

Thanks again!

Just a quick administrative note here.

The permissions on this thread were inadvertantly set so that people could post without registering. They've now been changed so that people have to register to post to this forum.

So, mhhfive, if you have any followup comments or questions, you may need to register and log in first before you can post again.

Thanks.

Jim,

Terrific answers. Thank you for spending so much time to give us some insight into the operations of Ask.

I've been enjoying the Ask Jeeves Blog. I really like that there are a number of different people posting to it, and think it does a nice job of humanizing Ask by giving us a feel for some of the different personalities behind the site.

There are a lot of great technologies out on the web these days. In a question that may not reflect on Ask itself, I wonder if you would share with us some of the sites and technologies that you are finding interesting these days.

Rbester: What is your site/domain? Just tell us what the site is and we can talk.

search-22.com

Thx!

Jim,

Thanks for your thoughtful replies. I'm looking forward to hearing from Rahul & Keith. Please let both of them know they did a terrific job speaking at their respective conferences. It was a pleasure to meet them both.

BTW - Since you asked for input, I do believe there is space for innovation in the field of e-mail. Gmail was a step in the right direction in terms of UI, but it certainly is not perfect (far from it). If AskJeeves spends the effort and has the people, I believe e-mail could be a great way for you to generate a big buzz in the search space. After all, superior products in our space tend to get recognized and used much more often than in other sectors. Also, I'd love to see more unique "AJ" features - I'm always thinking about the services a real "Jeeves" would provide and feel like that creative thinking could produce some seriously cool toys - for example, collating search results and suggesting them the way Amazon does with products??

Thanks again!