London — Rosy days are back again! If you can remember Jeeves, the quintessentially cartoon butler of the late 1990s and early 2000s, who serves up answers to search queries, saying its British users missed him after the company dropped him three years ago, is being brought back as the face of the Ask.com Internet search engine in the UK, as the company tries to boost its user numbers and revenues.
Ask.com “retired” Jeeves in 2006, after the company was acquired by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp, and started a process of global re-branding.
Ask is re-emerging with its original name, “Ask Jeeves,” in Britain, and is introducing a multi-million-pound advertising campaign on Monday featuring an updated, three-dimensional and less servile Jeeves than his previous incarnation.
Ask.com research indicated that, three years after his departure, 83 per cent of people still remembered Jeeves. This is compared to 72 per cent who knew what Ask.com was.
The original hand-drawn character, who first debuted in 1996, is being re-imagined in 3D and will front a new “Jeeves Suggests” feature.
Ask.com Europe MD Cesar Mascaraque, said that he witnessed the strength of the old brand at first hand when he joined the company 18 months ago. He said the move is a response to a survey, conducted in England after Ask.co.uk’s October relaunch, found aided brand awareness at 72 percent for the current site – but 83 percent for the deceased butler. Jeeves’ resurrection is also designed to consolidate Ask’s focus on natural-language search questions, rather than queries alone.
“When I told my friends and family I was going to work for Ask, they looked puzzled, but when I said it was the new Ask Jeeves, they suddenly understood what I was talking about,” he said.
The character is modeled on Reginald Jeeves, the capable fictional valet to bumbling English gentleman Bertie Wooster created by the 20th-century comic novelist and short-story writer P.G. Wodehouse.
“It is a kind of warm feeling that he brings back to Ask,” Mascaraque, said in a statement.
“Not only is he has re-emerged on the homepage, but he crops-up on most search pages with search query suggestions and helps answer ‘questions of the day.’”
Ask Jeeves was originally made a debut in the UK in 1999 through a joint venture between its US creators and Carlton Communications and Granada Media Group, the UK television companies.
Part of the £40m that Carlton and Granada invested in Ask Jeeves was paid in the form of advertising, giving Jeeves a great deal of media exposure in the early years of the dotcom boom.
Ask, a division of Barry Diller’s Internet media company IAC/InterActive Corp, says it has stabilized its British base at 15 million users per month by fine-tuning the relevance and speed of the results it delivers and its user-friendliness.
In the United States, Ask is the fourth-most popular search engine after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft with 3.8 percent of the market, according to industry tracker comScore.
In addition to being integrated throughout the Ask UK search engine, the company seemingly hopes to use Jeeves as a base for promotion via social media. First of all, he has a Twitter account, although he has not made any updates yet. His Facebook page, however, already has some status updates from Jeeves, as well a small group of fans.
Ask distinguishes itself from other search engines by specializing in providing answers to everyday questions on subjects such as health, travel or home improvements asked in natural-language question form, rather than by keywords.