Jeeves slims down for more agile searches

By Steve Malone

Posted on 21 Sep 2004 at 16:18

The Ask Jeeves search portal has been given a makeover. Not only has the portly figure of Jeeves himself been put on the Atkins diet in these health conscious times, the site itself has been upgraded with new features.

In keeping with the 'gentleman's gentleman' philosophy of the site, regular visitors can develop their own personal web search history. Users can save their search queries and results which can be organised into folders or shared.

The company has also upgraded its Teoma search engine. Under the new version, pages are ranked not only by link popularity but also by 'authority' according to links from `expert` sites. Expert sites are judged to be so by sites with similar content. Thus within a community of car sites which link to each other, a site which is given more links by its peers is judged to be more 'expert'. Therefore any outward links from that site are given more weight.

The site is also scrambling to catch up with leaders Google and Yahoo. It is now making daily crawls of popular sites to keep the index fresh. It also says it has two billion pages indexed and is aiming for 2.5 billion by the end of the year. This compares to the 4.2 billion indexed by Google. For the US market, the site has also upgraded its local search directories to include features like weather, people search and movies.

Meanwhile, visitors to the British version of the Ask Jeeves site will be perplexed to know that Jeeves is still officially 'on holiday`. Presumably he will return once he has sorted out the Americans. Ask Jeeves UK, says that the more svelte Jeeves will appear on the British site by tomorrow.