Ask Jeeves Inc. to Be Bought for $2 Billion

New York Times ^ | March 21, 2005 | GERALDINE FABRIKANT

[the invisib1e hand]

Has anyone here ever used "ask Jeeves"? I think I used it once a few years back.

Exactly. What on earth gives this company value? The page (if I recall from the two or so times it came up by accident) is embarassingly idiotic.

It must be a sweetheart deal by investment bankers and VC's who own most of the stock.

[L.N. Smithee]

Yikes, I'd better scrape up a billion quickly to buy MySimon.com before someone else snatches it up!

I have always wondered how many people were dissuaded from MySimon.com by their hideous giant-eyed mascot (before they softened its look).

[Holicheese]

My buddy worked for them many years ago.
I tried it and I thought it was lame.
Are the advert. revenues worth almost $2 Billion?

[snugs]

My major search engine it is good for asking questions if you ask a question I find it answers it better than google does. For word search I use google.

[whd23]

Has anyone here ever used "ask Jeeves"?

I tried, and boy did it s*ck.

I tried using it's natural language query and all it would return was advertisments. Useless.

[dfwgator]

Google better watch out, there is a new open source engine called Nutch, that is pretty good. It uses Lucene (IMHO the best OS tool ever).

[dennisw]

Are the advert. revenues worth almost $2 Billion?

Most definitely they are worth $2 billion ....... $2 billion in Diller dollars

[Straight Vermonter]

Here are the search engine stats from my web site:

2406 Google
704 Yahoo
456 MSN
302 Other search engines
121 Lycos
78 AOL
33 Hotbot
25 AltaVista
8 Netscape
6 Excite
5 Mamma
3 Go.com
3 AllTheWeb
3 WebCrawler
2 Search.com
2 MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)
1 Virgilio

I don't see any ask jeeves.