Ask Jeeves To Increase Staff by 20%

[Brett_Tabke]

[thestreet.com...]

Barry Diller's Internet empire expects to increase the staff at its Ask Jeeves search engine by about 20%, Ask Jeeves head Steve Berkowitz says. The expansion comes as Jeeves, which employs 650 workers now, posts solid gains in traffic but remains overshadowed by its more famous and deeper-pocketed rivals. IAC shares are down 10% for the year.

[mack]

Sharp contrast to their UK opperations where they laid off a large proportion of their sales staff.

cpc is a lot less in the UK though, so I guess the margins didn't justify the outlaw.

Mack.

[natural number]

Jeeves has that many workers? I think they should decrease their staff by 20%. I might search on Jeeves once a year. I bet they are going to hand edit their index again or hand edit it more.

[martinibuster]

A 20% increase is actually a downward trend from their 30% year to year staff growth, according to this quote last month [sfgate.com] by AJ's Glen Sunnergren, senior vice president of Human Resources:

"We are clearly in a hiring mode," said Sunnergren, pointing out that the company has enjoyed a 30 percent year-to-year increase in the size of its staff for several years.

Are they spinning a decrease in hiring?

I think a fact checker to keep all their statements consistent is one of the people they should be looking to hire.
;) Y

[ByronM]

A decrease in hirring doesn't show anything. For all we know it could be an increase in efficiency and better production.

20% growth for a company with only a few percentage points of the market isn't anything to shy off about.

I just wish they used more of there own results rather than google. Google NEEDS competition.