Bloglines Searching for Director

I ran across a job posting for the Director of Bloglines while I was looking for a job for after I graduate in May. The position was posted on November 21st and I wonder if it’s still open. I also wonder what this will mean for the future of my beloved feed reader.

From the posting:

As the GM of Bloglines you will be responsible for overall management of Bloglines including driving and overseeing the product, partner, marketing, customer acquisition and PR strategy and operations of the business. You will be the primary public spokesperson for Bloglines and will be expected to be a leading voice in the industry by conveying enthusiasm and passion for both Bloglines and the blogging/online syndicated content industry.

Some interesting requirements that fit with the product and culture:

• “Avid Blog reader required, active blogger preferred”
• “Passionate and enthusiastic with contagious energy and motivation, with a drive for success.”

Source: Bloglines Director job posting

Ask.com Relaunches

Ask has officially relaunched their site, and gone is Jeeves. It now pretty much looks like Google, and it remains to be seen whether the results have been improved or not. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Ask.com Directions and Maps looks amazing, however. You can right click on a map and add a location, and then directions are recalculated to visit that location after all others. And you can use your mouse’s scrollwheel to zoom in and out of the map. Very nice. I may just have to start using it from now on.

Jeeves Leaves

In this video, Jeeves leads the Ask.com basketball team to victory. In the end the realize they don’t need him to win.

A very creative use of YouTube by a company. And you can check out the blog post where they introduce the video here.

Ask Jeeves Focusing on Quality

CNET has a recap of the keynote speech Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowitz made at the Search Engine Strategies conference. With InterActiveCorp’s deep pockets, Ask Jeeves can reduce its reliance on ad-based revenue and focus on investing in its core search business. Going forward, Ask Jeeves will have “a single focus: how do we grow market share?” said Berkowitz. He predicted the company would grow from about 6 percent market share today to double-digit share next year.

The Jeeves9000

Ask Jeeves has just released a beta of their humanoid robot named the Jeeves9000. There are many videos of the bot in action, including this one of its integration with Bloglines. It will initially retail for $399.99, with a free ad-supported model to follow.

I Heart Bloglines

Well my free Bloglines t-shirt finally came. It’s pretty snazzy and came with a thank you letter from Ask Jeeves’ PR head. I have also started using Bloglines in earnest lately. It does a great job of allowing me to organize my feeds and the Bloglines Notifier for Firefox is a great tool. I am always bothered with having to open up all the sites I visit frequently and check for updates, but now Bloglines does it for me.

Ask Jeeves To Be Bought

Ask Jeeves is being bought by InterActiveCorp, which holds Expedia and Ticketmaster among their portfolio of web sites, for $1.85 billion in IAC stock. This is a great move for IAC and hopefully will be good for Ask Jeeves. “IAC said it would boost AskJeeves’ distribution, research and technology budgets, increase its local offerings, and integrate IAC’s brands and offerings into the AskJeeves properties. It pledged to promote AskJeeves’ search box on all of its sites.”

Update: The Ask Jeeves Blog now has a post about the acquisition, though it’s skimpy on the details. There’s even a nice image done by the Ask Jeeves people.

Desktop Search and Me: or how two applications can coexist

For the past few months I have been using the Google Desktop Search application and have been generally satisfied with the results. What’s great about the program is that it crawls my information in the background and gives me results integrated with any Google search I perform. I particularly enjoy the new web cache feature that works with Firefox because I am able to find caches of pages that have disabled browser caching. This was useful in the recent Google X debacle because my browser didn’t cache it but there was a version or two from Google Desktop Search.

While GDS is great when integrated with Google web search, I prefer Ask Jeeves Desktop Search as a standalone product. What I absolutely love about Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is that it attaches itself to the “Open File” window allowing me to easily search for the file I am trying to open. It then opens the file I select in the application I am working in. And the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search lets you choose to index your information gradually or quickly. Definitely a must-have application.

One thing I would like to see is one of these desktop search applications allowing me to set it as the default Windows search service. Why do I have all these great applications and still have to use the built-in Windows search because I sometimes forget I have the other applications?

Ask Jeeves Who?

I have never really used Ask Jeeves. Sure I used to use Yahoo and Metacrawler back in the days before I found Google, but I never gave Ask a chance. I even used Teoma a few years ago when I found out about it (I even met one of the people who worked on it at Rutgers) and I have since discovered that Ask Jeeves bought Teoma a while back. In fact Ask Jeeves runs a lot of big websites. Remember iWon.com? Excite? Ask Jeeves has one of the most impressive collections of services and technologies, and yet I never use it.

But why is that? Is it because the search results are below par? Is it because it’s hard to use? No, it’s because I have been seduced by Google. I no longer try things out for myself if Google has an alternative. I turn to Google for all of my answers. There is nothing wrong with that, but I feel there must be something else out there that I am missing.

And that is why today I decided to give Ask Jeeves an honest try. I will continue to use Gmail, but my default search engine will be Ask Jeeves. I have even added Ask Jeeves to my Firefox search box and set it as the default. I will run this try for the next few weeks, or until I can’t find the results I need on Ask Jeeves, and I will document my experiences as it becomes necessary. I will also post about some of the interesting things that Ask Jeeves has been doing lately, such as buying Bloglines.