May 10, 2005
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Emboldened by its pending purchase by Barry Diller's deep-pocketed Web conglomerate InteractiveCorp, Web search provider Ask Jeeves plans to take square aim at industry giants Google and Yahoo when the deal closes.
By Reuters
"This is a deal focused on growth," said Steve Berkowitz, chief executive of Ask Jeeves, which is best known for its cartoon butler mascot.
"We're going to have access to more capital, more opportunities. We get to play on that larger playing field," Berkowitz said in a recent interview. IAC has about $4 billion in cash while Ask Jeeves has about $100 million, he said, illustrating the greater resources the company would have access to.
IAC is paying nearly $2 billion for Ask Jeeves, and the transaction is slated to close this summer.
Ask Jeeves, the fourth-most used Web search provider in the United States after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, has about 7% market share and is gunning for double digits.
Berkowitz said the purchase by IAC will give the one-time Internet darling a fresh start. It had a booming initial public offering during the dot-com heyday, busted with the sector, then emerged from the ashes when Google proved money could be made on targeted search advertising.
"It's kind of like the fourth period for us," Berkowitz said, using a sports metaphor for the last quarter in a game. "Come August or September we will have a great story to tell."
IAC will soon split its travel operations such as Expedia.com and Hotels.com from its Internet properties.
IAC CEO Diller has said that Ask Jeeves will be the gateway to the new IAC--which will include everything from local search company Citysearch and event ticketing site Ticketmaster, to online mortgage company LendingTree, dating site Match.com and the Home Shopping Network.
Each of the IAC companies will have an Ask Jeeves search box on its Web site--as will sites under the new Expedia--and analysts expect Ask Jeeves to be the glue that ties together IAC's disparate properties.
Meanwhile, Ask Jeeves is hard at work on new tools and features aimed at attracting more search traffic.
Priorities include international expansion, mobile and local search, personalization tools and features that help users zero in on the information they seek.
After moving into the search market in Japan and Spain, Ask Jeeves this year plans to tackle the rest of Western Europe.
Among other projects, it is hammering out a search engine for blogs, which are wildly popular and gaining credibility in media and corporate circles. That service, due in several months, would compete with leading blog search provider Technorati.
Oakland, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves bought privately held Bloglines in February. The service, which aggregates content delivered via RSS feeds, makes it easier for news junkies to keep up with the latest information.
RSS, otherwise known as really simple syndication, is an open syndication standard that allows providers of news and other information to distribute broadly across the Web.
Like its rivals, Ask Jeeves is focused on tools to help Web searchers more quickly find the answers they seek.
"There is still a lot of room to grow, just from the point of basic relevance and search results," said Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves' senior vice president of search properties.
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