THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
Posted on April 30th, 2007by Michael Gray in Case Study
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Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to actually see one of these billboards
or perhaps you’ve seen one of the following mentioned somewhere on the web
THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY
To the advertising company who’s running the campaign I have to say please get a clue!
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search do some search engine optimization first.
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search do some search engine marketing and buy some PPC advertising.
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search and want it to go viral, seed the blogosphere with some hints.
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search put some pictures on photo sharing services like flickr.
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search put some videos on video services like Youtube.
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search don’t neglect social media and bookmarking services.
If you’re doing a campaign for a company related to search and you don’t have anyone on staff who is intimate with the space, hire a consultant.
For a viral campaign it’s impossible to absolutely control the message, but you should at least try to guide it in the direction you want it to go instead of letting it flounder and flop around on the ground like a fish out of water.
Sphere: Related Content
April 30th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
The Algorithm Lacks Market Share.
April 30th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I first saw that very billboard while waiting to enter the Lincoln Tunnel. I was with a friend who pointed it out and asked if I had any clue what that meant. I knew right away what it was and told him it was an ad for Ask.com.
Look at it this way, on a 7 hour drive from Toronto to New York, we must have passed hundreds or thousands of billboards. That particular one was the only one we taled about (actually, we didn’t really talk much about it - I just told him what it meant). Maybe, you might just say that that particular billboard worked?
The algorithm didn’t help with the speeding ticket I got in New York State.
May 1st, 2007 at 12:27 am
THE ALGORITHM GETS ALL ITS DISTRIBUTION FROM ADWARE BUNDLED WITH SMILEY ICONS
May 1st, 2007 at 5:26 am
I’m sure they need your advice on how to make advertising work. How kind of you.
Turns out everybody has an opinion of something that hasn’t even started yet! How cool is that!
Just wait see where this is going.
If there’s someone who knows how to do this, is them. Remember subservientchicken.com ? Well, that’s enough proof.
May 1st, 2007 at 7:33 am
>I’m sure they need your advice on how to make advertising work.
Looking at the SERP’s for those phrases, sadly it appears they need somebody’s help
May 1st, 2007 at 11:22 am
Until these companies realize that whatever the default homepage or default search is for the pre-installed browser that came with the computer, that is what people will use. Very few users ever go out of their way to change that. Case in point: one of the top searches at yahoo is Google or some derivative. Yahoo users are at a search engine and they don’t even realize it. Instead of spending millions on a billboard and tv advertising campagain, Ask should spend the money to get their search engine as the default homepage and search for every Dell, HP, Gateway, etc… machine that is produced. That is how to gain market share. Another good option for Ask would be to start paying smaller computer shops to do the same thing. If they got Geek Squad, Firedog, and the thousands of small repair shops to setup Ask.com as their default search, they’d gain users by the thousands in a hurry. It’d be a ton cheaper to do that than to run national TV and billboard spots.
May 1st, 2007 at 1:12 pm
What exactly do they expect people to do, remember the phrases until they get home and search for them?
poor idea.
May 1st, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Well people are talking about it more than most other advertising campaigns so something is working…
Si
May 1st, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Getting people talking about it half the battle, yes it’s an important half, but it’s only half. if they search for that phrase and you leave them hangin’ what good was it?
May 1st, 2007 at 4:46 pm
The algorithm was in the passenger seat when Jeeves was carjacked. Welcome to Jersey.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Michael –
In 2001, I was the VP of Product Development for Ask Jeeves, leading the development team that ran their search products. I had come into that position as a result of being one of the founders of one of their larger acquisitions, Direct Hit. My Direct Hit team had created a search engine and many other products (e.g. a PPC engine that was on par, dollar for dollar, with Overture, a Shopping search engine, and others). We did a lot of great things (all algorithmically based) that Jeeves managed to kill.
I can tell you that what killed Ask Jeeves wasn’t any algorithm. It was brilliantly bad management.
For one, they never should have bought our company, at least not for the reason they did and certainly not for $500M — I kid you not (check it if you don’t believe me). They squandered $25M on stupid, pointless advertising in less than 3 months. They were ruled by marketing, and never fully understood the main problem they tried to solve (you know, the simple problem of computers understanding human language) at anything more than the most superficial level.
Ask.com still exists. They seem to have managed to kill another fine technology, Teoma, albeit more slowly. And now, 8 years after buying our little search concept (a “popularity engine”) they are dusting off that patent and seeing if they can make a go of it. It’s still a good algorithm; I guess they didn’t kill it outright
When I was there, there were few people who even understood what an algorithm truly was (and indeed, their search product was more a set of complicated, unmanageable heuristics than anything like an algorithm). So if this silly billboard ad implied that it was Google’s algorithm that killed Jeeves, it has hit the nail on the head, in a kind of pointless, wasteful way. You know, the same pointless wasteful way that underpinned Jeeves’ original near-demise.
Silicon valley continues to be filled with a lot of air, as far as I can tell.
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:16 pm
If I ever get a ton of money, some of it will be spent buying adspace on random, highly visible billboards and filling it with similarly random phrases.