All About Content

Ask Jeeves is going to increase its staff by about 20%, Ask Jeeves head Steve Berkowitz says. According to TheStreet.com:

The search company has a storied history, of sorts. Ask Jeeves (NASDAQ: ASKJ) shares quadrupled on their first day of trading in 1999, only to crash when the Internet bubble burst. Now the company, which became part of New York-based IAC in a $1.9 billion deal completed in July, is expanding both its operations center and its corporate headquarters staff.

AskJeeves.com is growing market share at a better rate, 77%, then the other engines. Still, it lags Google, Yahoo and MSN Search by a wide margin having at this point less than 3% of the search market. So the 9-year-old site needs to differentiate itself from its competitors, with or without its butler mascot Jeeves. That’s what Berkowitz hopes to do by adding, among other things, suggestions for searchers on how to refine their queries. That’s something Yahoo already does but Ask Jeeves users tend to search very differently - with Ask’s users tending toward natural language queries phrased as complete sentences or questions.

p.s. Ask Jeeves is rumored to be expanding into Germany.