sublime1 - 1:27 am on Oct 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

Old habits die hard.

I was part of Direct Hit, which got bought by Ask Jeeves, and watched as they (then we) thrashed about over many years with natural language. It was pure BS -- more than 95% of searches boiled down to straight keyword ... not matched by their "semantic knowledge" database that could "disambiguate" meanings like "how do you swing a bat" and "how does a bat see". Of course no one asked questions like that, or if they did, their army of editors would have to instruct the database what the semantic meaning was, first. So the vast majority of searches fell through to regular search engines. But the charming Butler was always there to ask if you needed help.

Then they bought our (Direct Hit) search engine which was marginal after the first 10 results. They got boed with that, so then they bought Teoma, which was also marginal but had a really charismatic guy leading it. Then they did the adwords deal with the devil which saved their butts again. Then they got bought by IAC, then the butler went away.

I haven't been there for a while, but knowledgeable sources inside tell me they are not using Google results directly ... however use techniques that are very similar to Google's for penalizing. So they don't have the horsepower to get the good results, but they at least get rid of anything vaguely fishy. They have to, or else they wouldn't get to put up adwords, would they?

And now, full circle.

I have watched Yahoo piss away its lead in search again and again. Ask certainly had some mindshare, back when we used that phrase, but they couldn't concentrate, and lost it all, over, and over, and over. They are only around now because they got incredibly lucky and managed to score a secondary public offering of $85M just before the last time the bubble burst.

Ask has been roadkill since 2002. They had better re-re-re-re-reinvent themselves again soon.