Based On An Exclusive Interview With Ask's Jim Lanzone. It appears that Yahoo!'s bold and less than brilliant foray into " Looksmart-like " paid inclusion may have been
final nudge that AskJeeves needed to shut down their paid inclusion program, Index Express (not Index Connect which is Inktomi). This significant shift of AskJeeves away from their 18 month-old paid inclusion program appears to be a timely distancing from pending storm coming to Yahoo! after it announced its new Site Match system. Why did AskJeeves shut down their Index Express service? To get to bottom of that I spoke today with Jim Lanzone, VP of product management at AskJeeves. First I should mention that he very carefully noted he does not believe there is a 'dark underbelly' to monetary search engine inclusion models. He noted Yahoo!, Looksmart, and many others when he emphasized that. When we concentrated on topic of cancelled Index Express service he explained that AskJeeves came to this decision based on two elements; first was technical and attributed to significant testing of their paid inclusion model, second was entirely monetary. The testing revealed that the differences between a page submitted via a trusted feed (xml feeds via Index Express customers) and a page indexed by Ask spider were so significant that attributing proper relevance was very difficult. As a result, users, advertisers and Ask technicians alike were finding Index Express submitted pages ranking in odd places; sometimes ranking inordinately high or low. The second reason focuses on what is likely shareholder's bottom line; model was “not a very good monetization vehicle."
Will AskJeeves database take a big hit with this change? This is difficult to say but considering that Jim Lanzone said 30,000 of 2 Billion pages indexed in Ask were Index Express pages there could be a miniscule drop in Ask's database size. Other than that I cannot foresee any significant negative impact. In fact, I only see a brilliant move here since paid inclusion models will undeniably be under FTC and SEO microscope for next few months, what with Yahoo!'s 6 web properties adapting to it with gusto.
Note: It is important that our readers understand that paid submission process at Ask Jeeves is still active and recommended by staff at StepForth. According to Jim Lanzone, sites that are submitted via Site Submit will be indexed within one week and then repeatedly 2 times per week. Considering that sites which do not pay submit may not be found or may only be indexed sporadically, this appears to be a very worthwhile service.
An Inside Glimpse of AskJeeves
Right now AskJeeves has a search engine that, in my opinion, is truly impressive. The natural language processing and wealth of quality information in their database has become so good that searching by query actually provides relevant results 90% of time! This is a vast improvement over original natural language system that Ask had in place just a year ago. When asked what made AskJeeves so different from its competitors, Jim answered decisively that it was Ask's search technology that put it in a category all of its own. Why technology? Well Jim argued that intuitive query performance of search and system's ability to reliably show only experts in every field was Ask's ‘secret sauce'. When I personally put this to test I had to agree that at very least top results I found were relevant and spam-free… an impressive characteristic. What I must enter into consideration, however, is considerable difference in database size in comparison to Ask's competitors; Ask has only 2 billion pages, whereas Google claims a 6 billion count and Yahoo! over 4.5 billion. In this case size does matter… especially when you consider trying to filter twice to three times more content.
