IAC Gets A Search Box, Acquires Jeeves

By Andrew Goodman
Expert Author
Article Date: 2005-03-21

Once again, the Law of Noise has proven itself. Ask Jeeves certainly had the promotional volume turned up to "11" in recent months -- and that's loud when you have 4% market share.

When that happens, I always suspect that either someone's selling stock, or someone's thinking of buying the whole company.

I wondered if that someone was AOL. Nope.

Today, Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. announced they're acquring Ask Jeeves for about $1.85 billion.

Along with tapping into the growth of search advertising, IAC thinks it can increase traffic to the Jeeves site by putting a search box on all of its other properties. Maybe so.

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About the Author:
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients' paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.

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