Internet Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 25

EXCLUSIVE EXTRA! AltaVista Forms AskJeeves Alliance

Details of the AltaVista/Jeeves Deal

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, nor has the new arrangement been formally announced by either company. The deal is said to be non-exclusive. My source tells me that talks between Jeeves and other search engine sites are also underway.

AskJeeves was founded in 1996 and is based in Berkeley, California. Under the deal, the main Jeeves service at aj.com remains unchanged. The aj.com site had recently undergone several tweaks to the interface.

Currently, AltaVista takes most of the credit for the Jeeves knowledge base on the results page, saying prominently "AltaVista knows the answer to these questions." The use of Jeeves for this feature is revealed at the bottom of the results page in a small typeface.

Not all users will see Jeeves results when they enter queries. The Jeeves engine uses an internal algorithm to score the quality of the match between a user's query and the candidate template questions in the Jeeves knowledge base. My source tells me that if that score is very low, then AltaVista will simply not offer Jeeves results – just as the aj.com site will defer to metacrawler results in such a case.

Now that the AltaVista main page encourages people to enter their questions in natural language form, it will be interesting to see if user behavior changes as a result. Search engine sites report consistently that the vast majority of user queries are entered as a single word or short phrase. Whether the user types in a typical search term, or a properly phrased question ending in a question mark, the query is funneled to Jeeves. However, queries phrased in the form of a question -- say, beginning with "What is…" -- may provide cues to the Jeeves engine that aid its matching process.

In fact, for most search engines, entering a question in natural language adds "noise" to the question, increasing the number of false or useless hits in the result set. To some extent, this arrangement assumes that a user query will be optimized for Jeeves or AltaVista (or RealNames) by happenstance; it will be hard for a user to enter a single query that is optimal for all the engines.

Moreover, the AltaVista version of Jeeves has not yet been upgraded to support another one of AltaVista's features – the ability to handle multiple languages. Such an upgrade would require translation of the entire Jeeves knowledge base of some two million questions – and possibly some tweaks to its software as well, to handle differences in linguistic structures.

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