SEL: Ask Jeeves scraps it out with search engine giants

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Search marketing in the new media era.

October 29, 2003

Ask Jeeves scraps it out with search engine giants

Great article over at Red Herring which charts the rise and fall and rise again of Ask Jeeves.

"When Steve Berkowitz joined Ask Jeeves as head of its Web properties division in April 2001, the company was in a full-blown meltdown. The once high-flying Web business posted net losses of $425 million that year, including a $355 million charge to reflect the crumbling value of businesses it acquired at the height of the boom. Its stock traded for around a dollar, down from a high of $191 in November 1999.

If you were a gambling man – and a cautious one at that – you might safely bet that Ask Jeeves was headed toward the same dot-com graveyard then bursting with hundreds of companies that were too ill-conceived or ill-funded to survive the economic turndown.

You would have lost that bet."

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

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