Answers 5.0 has beefed-up "insight" capabilities that show clients exactly what questions customers typed into the search box. This allows companies to learn a great deal more about a customer's needs than can be gleaned from a log of keyword searches, which simply show the word searched and the results returned. "If people are asking about things that you don't have, then a typical clickstream tells you nothing," says Claudio Pinkus, president of Jeeves Business Solutions.
Take Nike's site. Customers were asking for a rugged, high-support mountain running shoe, but there was no such product available. So some people left the site, while others bought a cross-training shoe because that was the closest alternative. "If Nike's knowledge had been limited to customers' purchase decisions, no one would ever known the huge appetite for this mountain shoe was out there," notes Easterlin. "Now they're talking about developing such a product."
Jeeves reports the response to Answers 5.0 has been strong and it has acquired two new customers: Nestle's Friskies division and Ralston-Purina. Beyond that, execs won't reveal how many customers have signed up.
Optimism still runs high at the Emeryville offices, where walls are decorated with banners of staffers' favorite questions - "Where are my socks?" and "What are some fun pickup lines?" - on Ask.com. But those aren't the real questions on the minds of Jeeves executives and investors. The query that matters most is whether Jeeves will be able to expand its corporate business and survive.
Certainly it can't count on robust ad revenue. Even though traffic to the portal has hit an all-time high, and Media Metrix rated Jeeves' Web properties - Ask.com, Ask Jeeves Kids and subsidiary Direct Hit, a search firm - as the 17th most-popular Web destination in March, revenues from the Web properties group sunk from $12.5 million in the last quarter of 2000 to $9 million the first quarter of this year.
So Jeeves' future will depend on revenue growth from corporate clients. Battle hopes an automated version of the company's search engine, expected this fall, will supply a big boost. The new product, a nonhosted search technology, can sit behind a company's firewall, neatly addressing the privacy concerns that have made banks and financial institutions reluctant to turn their content management over to a third party.
Despite the economic slump, the corporate market offers some promise. In a recent Forrester poll of more than 700 senior business executives, 59 percent said they are maintaining or accelerating their Internet efforts. In a memo to investors, Merrill Lynch strategist Steve Milunovich wrote that "companies are not slowing their use of Internet technologies because of the economy. Webification is a strategic priority and a cost-saver."
Can reinvention save Jeeves? "I do see demand in the marketplace [and] a good product," says IDC analyst Susan Feldman. "I think [Ask Jeeves] has a reasonable chance." If it fails, Jeeves can only blame itself for not shifting course faster. The epitaph would be clear: The butler did it.
Melanie Haiken is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
