Have you been Asking Jeeves? Options

[bragadocchio]

There's a change taking place at Ask Jeeves, and the timing is interesting given the latest news over Yahoo! and that Search Engine's new payment plans.

A spokesperson from Ask Jeeves informed Resource Shelf about their reasons to end their paid inclusion program.

Ask Jeeves has two types of submission, as seen on this page. They are keeping their "Site Submit", but removing their "Index Express" program, which used direct xml feeds.

One of the main reasons cited for the change is that removing the xml feeds results in more relevant search results.

Andy Beal published a pretty nice interview with Ask Jeeves Vice President of products Jim Lanzone last week. He had some interesting things to say. Here's a snippet:

The future of paid inclusion is more likely to be in separate, possibly 100% paid indexes, than it is the current mix of paid and unpaid links, and structured and unstructured data. It's better for monetization, better for relevance, and probably better for the FTC.

That answer somewhat foreshadowed the decision to halt "Index Express."

[bragadocchio]

If you've been watching the UK version of Ask Jeeves, you noticed last week that they added a feature called Smart Search, which has been part of US site ask.com since last year.

But, that's not why the search engine's stock prices surged last night. Neither is the dropping of xml feeds mentioned in the post above.

Westchester Journal News[/url]]Interactive Search Holdings was the 12th most visited U.S. property on the Web in January with 23.8 million unique visitors as measured by comScore Media Metrix, which ranks the company as the Excite Network. 

Its Web sites include My Way, My Search, My Web Search, iWon, Excite and the MaxOnline advertising network.

And:

Because the sites run by Interactive Search Holdings offer news and other features as well as search, they have attracted more advertisers than Ask Jeeves. 

The number of ads viewed by visitors to Ask Jeeves was 59 million in 2003. Visitors to iWon.com, by contrast, viewed 41 billion ads.

The ContraCostaTimes looks at the deal from what each part brings to the total, and it looks like a great fit.

The end result might be 7% of search on the web, but it looks like a pretty smart move.

It appears that we will be seeing more results on the web in more places, from Teoma, which is owned by Ask Jeeves.