Ordinary Nothing

Either Ask Jeeves have some bored new employees, or they officially have some serious concerns about they way people see them (Nice, but not too good in relevancy) and believe that their blog indexing abilities are somewhat lacking.

During the last day this not particularly popular blog of mine has gotten two hits from the ask.com domain. Both from a Bloglines subscriber running a search (a subscribed, repeated search. Not a one time search) there (and not in Ask Jeeves). Says something about how well they believe they index blogs.

One search was for "Ask Jeeves" and one for "Jeeves".
Since I have one entry (Hey, that’s two now) that mentioned Ask Jeeves, it was shown in both their search results. And despite it being very obviously not relevant (but then again, we did say that Jeeves had a relevancy problems with searches, no? Maybe it starts with the real humans and propagate to the engine from there?) they clicked through to read the full post.
And yes, the excerpt is enough to ascertain that the post does not talk about the search engine, but only mentioned in passing that it’s about the question that got into my referrer log.

Is this a good thing, that they show an interest about what people think about them? Or is that an indication that there are problems over there and they’re desperate for something to help?
And what should it mean that the team of a large search engine uses a different search engine to constantly monitor themselves? Is it OK since they don’t index blogs purposefully? Is it an indication that they just now decided blogs are important and are in fact working on it?

Or was it all just a bored employee that wants to know what people think about their company, and picked what they thought to be the best tool for the job? Still says something…

I find it amusing, in any case. Maybe Jeeves won’t.
At least this post is somewhat relevant, if they get here.

November 11th, 2004 at 1:09 EET | Categories: Marketing, Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.