Why did jeeves character disappear from ask com

The butler character is making a return to the brand in the UK because Ask. However, Ask is eager to steal market share from the likes of Google , Yahoo!

From this week, internet users will be able to reach Ask Jeeves via ask. The Jeeves character was shown the door in early when the company said it wanted to distance itself from perceptions of it as "that quirky little site where you ask questions".

The "new" Jeeves icon has been given a full makeover by Framestore -- a company that specialises in animation and visual effects in movies.

He will also have his own Twitter and Facebook pages, where he will post daily questions, images, videos and a diary. Research conducted by YouGov found that the majority of respondents wanted Jeeves back as the face of the search engine. Jeeves's return will be publicised by a marketing campaign including TV, radio, press and online advertising in which he will answer questions relevant to content.

Despite his sharp appearance, Jeeves was dangerously close to insolvency. Ask Jeeves would rebound from those dark times. But the behemoth in the search engine space wasn't sharing the market: It owned 32 percent of the industry compared to just 3 percent for Ask Jeeves. Gruener departed; Ask Jeeves morphed into Ask. Perceiving Jeeves to be representative of the s internet culture, Diller and IAC believed his charm had run its course.

While Diller had designs on being competitive with Google, it was not to be: That site went on to claim a clear dominance of the search market. By , corporate support for Ask. Aside from a brief return in in the UK, Jeeves has been unavailable to field any additional questions. BY Jake Rossen. By the late s, he was being asked where internet users could find nude photos of actresses.

The original AskJeeves. However, following a company buyout in the character was axed. The rationale was to shorten the domain name to ask. Fair enough. But what a waste of brand equity to chuck out the butler character. Took them 4 years of brand amnesia to remember what made them famous. But they got there in the end. Shame the new Jeeves is not quite right though, as the JKR blog explains: "The visual re-tooling of the character fails to capture the spirit of the idea in the same way as his predecessor.