I noticed this ad from Ask while I was in California on spring break… what I thought it meant then was “the algorithm sucked, and that’s why ask jeeves is no more.” I might have been wrong then. Here’s a small bit from SEO’Brien:
A couple weeks later that puzzling billboard was replaced with various messages apparently meant to provide clarification: “The algorithm is from Jersey,†and “The algorithm is banned in Chinaâ€Â
The first confirms the campaign is from Ask; their Teoma algorithm was developed in Piscataway, NJ.
It was the point about China that left me scratching my head again. Yes… it is…. so what? This is a message I would have expected from Yahoo! years ago when Google was banned from China leaving Y! the dominant engine (other than their own). Now, of course, Google is live and well in China (though still facing challenges).
So Ask is seemingly pointing out that their own algorithm, that which killed Jeeves, is banned in China.
After reading that post, I think what Ask is trying to do is say “hey, we didn’t bend to China’s laws just to have our search engine function their.”
I think it’s a good ad campaign, so many people complain about how Y! and Google changed their algorithms to fit China’s requirements, and now here’s Ask which stood up to the rights to share information freely.
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May 1st, 2007 at 1:20 AM
Great perspective on China, I don’t disagree with you. It is a good message in the context of standing on their own but why would you promote the fact that you are not reaching a billion customers while your competitors are?
May 1st, 2007 at 10:12 AM
Hmm…China is not the only country that could’ve given Ask Jeeves a boost towards fame though. Ask Jeeves was not only unsuccessful in China, it was also unsuccessful in the U.S. and in other countries. Just because its algorithm is banned in China means little. I have a feeling Ask is just using it as an excuse to point out how “good” they are by not bending to China’s will.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:38 PM
Paul:
Maybe Ask isn’t aiming for the whole market, just like Apple isn’t aiming for like PC user (well, in both cases, of course they would like to have all the users, but since they can’t, they aim for a specific group right?) I mean, Ask doesn’t even rank in the top 3 most used search engines, so I don’t think they’re trying to say “hey, we’re loosing a billion customers thanks to our algorithm!”, I think they just want their users now to know that they aren’t being ‘evil.’
Yian:
I agree with you that they may just be using it to point out how ‘good’ they are. But, as for the unsuccessful part, I don’t know. Maybe for Ask’s own goals, they are quite successful, but from everyone’s perspective, and how we define a successful search engine, they definitely aren’t as successful as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.