In 1997, a new search engine calling itself AskJeeves was introduced to the internet. The website had adopted Jeeves, a character from the stories of P.G. Wodehouse, as a sort of mascot – seemingly the ideal symbol for a search engine. Like Sherlock Holmes or Dumbledore, Jeeves is one of those literary characters whose wisdom never fails.

“Here he was, with his head bulging at the back and on his face that look of quiet intelligence that comes from eating lots of fish,” Wodehouse writes in his novel Carry on, Jeeves. “I knew from experience what a wizard he was at removing the oppressed from the soup.”

However, upon closer inspection, the company’s use of Jeeves is anything but obvious. How many people nowadays read Wodehouse? How many have even heard of him? But according to Patrick Crisp, the Director of Public Relations for Ask.com, Jeeves’ genius side was never the real point.

“A decade ago, the internet was scary,” Crisp said. “The idea behind Jeeves was to give users someone that would humanize the internet, make people comfortable in this scary world, and give them the vehicle where they could ask questions in plain English.”

Jeeves quickly became one of the internet’s original iconic characters, even appearing as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yet nine years later, AskJeeves made the decision to drop the titular Jeeves and convert to Ask.com. Why this sudden extreme re-branding of an already well-known name? And what was the result of the company’s image overhaul?

At first, Crisp admitted, many users were upset by the loss of Jeeves, who was officially “frozen in carbonite” according to Ask.com. “There was resistance,” Crisp said. “A lot of users were really attached to Jeeves.” But many more have reacted positively to the change.

Americans love to be served, but we hate the idea of servants. Google’s branded insouciance – and their no-nonsense presentation – suits our American ideals in a way that an obsequious butler never can. Still, dropping Jeeves was about more than dropping an outdated mascot. It was based on fundamental changes in the site itself.

The decision to drop Jeeves was a necessary step in an important re-branding process, said Crisp. When the site launched in 1997, “we had a team of editors looking at the top queries on AskJeeves and surfing the web on their own to pull together search results. This was good for popular questions, but it didn’t scale. Suddenly you needed more editors for more queries, which were becoming more diverse and specific. We were over-promising and under-delivering.”

In 2001, AskJeeves purchased a small company called Teoma, whose algorithm enabled the site’s users to search by keyword or by normal questions. But the butler was still hanging around the website, and he was beginning to be a liability. AskJeeves had branded him so well as a mascot for asking ordinary questions that no one knew you could now ask questions using only keywords.

“People were truly associating the butler with that ability to submit a query in the form of a normal question,” Crisp said, and noted that “since the re-brand, the percent of queries in the form of questions has dropped in half.”

Still, a company as recognizable as AskJeeves can’t re-brand without giving serious consideration to how to market the change. Ask, perhaps in keeping with the slightly gruesome fate they assigned the retired butler, created a campaign that left many users scratching their heads.

“We ran a campaign we internally called the algorithm campaign,” Crisp said, speaking about the posters and billboards which proclaimed ‘The algorithm killed Jeeves.’ “It was a new branding campaign to engage consumers, and to introduce the word ‘algorithm’ into the consumer vernacular. We wanted to get people to start thinking that maybe a search algorithm is important, to get them wondering whether they were using the best algorithm available.”

“That the algorithm killed Jeeves, I actually think it’s pretty true,” Crisp added. “The Teoma algorithm enabled us to do keyword queries, therefore not relying on the butler, so it’s a little bit of a play on words. The capability of Ask to answer key words and questions was the next generation, and Jeeves wasn’t needed.”

But Ask didn’t stop at retiring Jeeves. The site has had serious cosmetic work done over the past year, from customizable “skins” to a multi-columned user interface.

“I’ve heard people call us beautiful now,” Crisp said proudly. “Have you ever heard of Google being called beautiful? No. They have 50% of the market share, but I’ve never heard them called beautiful.”

But the real question is, did it work? How is Ask doing, now that Jeeves is propping up a wall in Jabba the Hut’s cyber-palace?

“In this most recent year, Ask had the highest jump in consumer satisfaction of any engine,” Crisp said, referring to the results of this year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). “Since we started in 2002, we’ve jumped 21 percent in consumer satisfaction – more than any other company in all the years [ACSI] has been testing.”

“I’m not surprised that those numbers are jumping,” Crisp said. “We’re pushing away that baggage of Jeeves, and moving into what I consider to be a beautiful search engine.”

Written by d/visible contributor Kris Larson.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Graphic Arts, Technology, Business, Branding, Advertising, Interview, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.