Ask Jeeves Personalizes After The Fact As Well

from the a-bit-late-to-the-game dept

Ask Jeeves apparently planned out a big publicity push for the launch of their new "personalized" feature for their search, but they came a week too late. What's amusing is that at least two different sites in the past week and a half "accidentally" broke the embargo on the news about Ask Jeeves' new personalized features, so you could say this wasn't exactly an Apple-level surprise, but Ask Jeeves is starting to let users store and share their search results. The reason it's a week too late is that, as we mentioned, two search engines announced the same thing last week. Still, it's becoming clear that the search engines are trying to solve the biggest problem that everyone always points out in the search busines: how can search engines be sticky? Switching costs are fairly low, but they figure that won't be the case if you have all your bookmarks stored with the search engine. So, now the question is whether or not users really want to be tied to the search engine, who is likely to mine your saved searches for targeted marketing, or would prefer to use an independent bookmarking service like Furl or del.icio.us -- or any other random such system (or hell, just store them locally)? In the meantime, how long will it be until Google launches the same thing... along with 1 gig of storage (of course)?

Leave a Comment..