I Drank Yummy Ask Jeeves Kool Aid
I spoke with Jim Lanzone today. I felt like the kid who has always liked airplanes talking to Orville Wright.

I have four typed pages of notes, enough stuff for several posts and I'll likely be publishing it in bits and pieces over the next few days.

My biggest takeaway was the strategy behind their results pages and a slightly better understanding behind their core technology. Plus I got to air my pet "smart boxes/suggestions as relevance patch" theory with someone who, uh, knows what the F he's talking about. I'll be sharing some of that too.

So yeah we talked quite a bit about vertical and personalized search, the products Jim's putting up around his search results, the Ask innovation strategy and life after Diller.

After talking with Jim I'm far more likely to use Ask. It's like when you meet someone in a band you haven't listened to that much or an artist whose work you've always known about but never really investigated: I now have a personal connection and I'm that much more interested in using Ask.

To me it's now Jim's search engine, for which I will change my search behaviors (I'm switching home page from Google to Ask for the week to see what happens :). Plus I kind of like the scrappy underdogs (and there's a bloglines link from the main Ask page - I'm on bloglines way more than any search engine).

Ok, so I'll have some more Ask stuff up soon, and oh yeah I owe you guys some AOL Gerry Campbell stuff too :)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |