Bid
to save search valet Jeeves
BBC.co.uk
October 06, 2005, 09:15 GMT
Search firm Ask is coming under pressure
to keep its Jeeves character as its public face.
A campaign centred around the Save Jeeves weblog
hopes to demonstrate to Ask the depth of feeling
about the iconic valet character.
The phasing out of Jeeves came about following
the $1.85bn acquisition of Ask by Inter-Active Corp
in May 2005.
Explaining its decision, Ask said the Jeeves character
confused users about how the search site has changed.
Lost leader
Inter-Active Corp boss Barry Diller announced that
Jeeves was to be phased out during a Goldman Sachs
investor conference in late September.
Ask has put no date on when the phasing out will
begin but it is thought likely that the valet will
soon start to become less prominent on the site
and in its marketing.
Comic novelist P G Wodehouse brought the Jeeves
character to life in a series of books where the
knowledgeable and perceptive valet helped a series
of gentlemen, most famously Bertie Wooster, cope
with life's vagaries.
The axing of Jeeves has prompted the creation of
an anonymous weblog by a former Ask employee who
is an ardent supporter of the Jeeves character,
despite an insistence on calling him a butler rather
than a valet.
The Save Jeeves blog author describing the axing
of Jeeves as a "terrible mistake", adding
that "the butler is the most human face, the
most welcoming character to greet the curious internet
searcher".
There were good reasons for keeping the character,
wrote the blogger, because it has attracted a loyal
group of users that prefer Ask Jeeves to other search
sites.
"People in the business world have become
blinded by their own immersion in the internet,
and they seem to have forgotten the massivly [sic]
large chunk of the population that still sees computers
and the internet world as a very intimidating place,"
said one entry on the blog.
Rachel Johnson, European marketing vice president
for Ask, said that it was currently investigating
what the character meant for the search site.
"There's a lot of passion about Jeeves and
we expected that when we started to investigate,"
she said.
"The passion is for the humanity he is adding,"
said Ms Johnson.
Bedside manor
In its investigation into its image, she said,
Ask was trying to find a way to preserve this empathy
without relying solely on Jeeves to do it for them.
"This is a big move for us and one we want
to do the right way," she said.
No date has been set for when the Jeeves character
will start to be phased out and Ms Johnson said
that Ask was still listening to users.
"The one thing we have never done is never
listen to the consumer," she said. "We
would be idiots if we weren't listening."
One group that may not lament the loss of the link
between Ask and Jeeves might be P G Wodehouse fans.
Tony Ring, editor of the P G Wodehouse Society's
quarterly magazine Wooster Sauce, said that although
the founders of Ask Jeeves counted themselves as
fans of the writer's work, that link has been eroded
over time.
Not least, said Mr Ring, because now the site can
be used to search for subjects, such as pornography,
that Wodehouse never wrote about.
"In Wodehouse, a bed was for strewing frogs
in as a punishment, or hiding under in country houses,
not for getting up to that sort of thing,"
Mr Ring told the BBC News website.
"But," he added, "from the point
of view that it might get some people, especially
the younger, asking 'Who was Jeeves?', it is a shame
that they don't maintain the link."
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