The summer sale of Ask Jeeves to InterActiveCorp for $2.3 billion dollars has spurred some changes to the search engine company. IAC Chairman Barry Diller has announced that the bald chubby butler named Jeeves will no longer be used. Also the name Jeeves has been dropped from the name, making it only Ask. IAC plans to make some back-end changes to improve the search engine functionality and believes that dropping Jeeves will help shake the search engine's old reputation which employed a search method which had users actually typing in questions into rather then the keywords. Since keyword searching has risen to prominence and the question asking method is long since dead I would agree IAC has a good point but we will see if the changes can help Ask any ground in the extremely crowded and competitive web search engine war.
For the blogosphere perspective check out Doctorvee, Ad Jab, Tech Blog, Search Engine News and No Geek Is An Island. Also check out Ask.com to see the changes for yourself.
