Ask.com Re-brands And Increases Traffic

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You may or may not remember “Jeeves” the famous butler from “Ask Jeeves”. Well, the butler was a fairly iconic figure who helped the company gain market share for awhile. But “fortune favors the bold”, and Ask decided to go in a different direction for their branding. SearchEngineWatch’s Rae Hoffman interview Michael Ferguson of Ask about the re-branding effort, and the series is covered in two parts:

• Rebranding Ask.com - Part One
• Rebranding Ask.com - Part Two

Some of the highlights are as follows:

On why they dumped the butler in the first place:

We had this differentiated site with a frequency problem—and for some an image problem. The user need served by phrasing searches as questions is only about 10% of overall search activity. So users kept coming, just in really wide arcs

And “just ask a question” set expectations too high—the technology couldn’t deliver consistently. We’d get questions like: “I grew up in Manhattan in the Fifties. There was a young nurse working at St. Mary’s named Beverly. How can I get in touch with her?” We promptly showed a banner ad for New York City hotels and some unsatisfying algorithmic matches.

The original Ask format would have users “Ask a question” and the butler would find it. The trouble was, he barely found anything, so their brand was considered low-quality. The interview goes into great detail about changing the brand, and re-designing the website.

Ferguson also claims the new Ask is good for search marketers:

The more rich and complex the results sets become (richer in sources, presentation, and media types), the more advertising agencies and small businesses will need outside expertise to get in the right place at the right time to get traffic. And that traffic will be even more qualified, as the engines improve interpreting and channeling user intent.

It’s safe to say that Ask has been on the upswing lately. Their TV ads have helped them attract more visitors, and many search marketers (myself included) are seeing more referrals from their updated engine. Time will tell just how much market share they can take from Google.

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