JeevesGuy - 2:44 am on Jun 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

Thanks Shorebreak -

Most publicly available analyst estimates have Ask Jeeves with 3-4% of domestic searches in the US. When we acquired ISH, they had roughly the same number of searches collectively, throughout their properties, as Ask.com did. Combined, they should be in the 7-8% range. (Remember that some of those sites are metasearch today. It's not traffic that is necessarily coming from Ask or Teoma.) Also, almost all of our traffic is US based, which differs from sites like Google.com which have more than half from outside the US.

I am not sure where you get the impression that 65% of clicks on our site go into the Google AdWords. Even when we show a lot of ads, those queries represent just a sliver of our overall query stream.
65% is nowhere close, even on pages where they appear, let alone pages that do not. We do get a higher average click rate on those ads than a site does that runs ads on the "right rail", but you are definitely overestimating the click volume that is "usurped" by AdWords on Ask.com. I'm sorry that I can't be more specific than that, but I want to make sure people know that this line of reasoning is offbase.

As for why some people in this thread, including you, are seeing less than 1% of their traffic from us, I don't know. I am not sure if your site is US based or international, or is in a category like "viagra"
which is ad heavy, or are not ranked high for popular queries, or perhaps the Frame (which we are in the process of removing) is blocking some people's ability to gauge traffic from us. To be honest, I do not know.

Lastly, as for making our statistics transparent, as far as I know we're the only search engine that tells the public a specific number of searches we get each month or quarter. You don't get that from Google or Yahoo or anyone else for that matter. We are by far the most transparent engine out there. If you are receiving less traffic from us than others, then you just are. For other people it might be different.

Either way, we really appreciate that you're rooting for us. We don't take it for granted and promise to make you proud in the months to come.

-JeevesGuy