No One Asks Jeeves
Ask - AJ - Ask Jeeves wherefore art thou?
Jeeves is not a search engine - it is a Pay Per Click Feed site, supplemented by search results.
Here are my summary referer stats for one of my busier sites, since Tuesday November 13, 2001 until today, Friday October 29, 2004:
- google.com 639290 (66%)
- yahoo 168895 (17%)
- msn 103808 (10%)
- altavista 25908 (2%)
- aol.com 16210 (1%)
- askjeeves.com 5094 (0%)
- netscape.com 2375 (0%)
- lycos 786 (0%)
- goto.com 600 (0%)
- alltheweb.com 543 (0%)
- iwon.com 417 (0%)
- mamma.com 382 (0%)
- hotbot.com 283 (0%)
- excite.com 130 (0%)
- looksmart.com 104 (0%)
- infospace.com 85 (0%)
- teoma.com 79 (0%)
- go2net.com 75 (0%)
- euroseek.net 62 (0%)
- go.com 16 (0%)
- webcrawler.com 16 (0%)
And you say, "Hey that's not so bad, AJ is beating Lycos and Mamma and even Netscape".
But wait, there's a catch. If I remove my Adwords tracking code from the logs, Ask referrals plummet to 1291.
Since November 2001.
Slightly more than 400 per year.
But wait, let's think about this a bit more. That means that 3083 people came to my site thanks to the Adwords campaign I started in November 2003.
But wait, there's more. This site has been #1, #2 or #3 for every major search term (according to Overture) since the site's inception, usually first and second place.
You just can't say that the niche just isn't searched for in Jeeves, because my Adwords traffic for the campaign is decent.
Am I unique? No, I am afraid not. One of my colleagues has a site in Ask via PositionTech's paid inclusion service. In 12 months, his term, #1 in the Ask Organic search, got ZERO traffic. These terms generate over 5,000 Adwords impressions per month.
Ask.com just doesn't have organic traffic - it's all being sucked away to their Google Adwords partner feed.
Ask is publically traded. Ask is publically hyped. But Ask just doesn't deliver.