Internet Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 26

EXCLUSIVE EXTRA! AltaVista Forms AskJeeves Alliance

AltaVista has built its own additional server capability at its facility in Palo Alto, with a copy of the global AskJeeves knowledge base, and sufficient server capacity to handle millions of queries daily. Now, every search query entered into the basic AltaVista search is funneled into an AskJeeves engine running in Palo Alto alongside the server farm that handles the traditional index.

So, does the Jeeves database run on the same DEC/Compaq Alpha hardware that powers the traditional AltaVista spider? My source tells me that the answer is no; the Jeeves servers in Palo Alto are Intel based PCs – from Compaq.

Despite the promise for specialty knowledge bases such as Jeeves and RealNames, sometimes the hype promises more than it can deliver. The invitation to enter a natural language query is seductive. Following the advice of the sample queries, I asked AltaVista the question:

What is the phone number for Apple Computer?

The answer from the Jeeves knowledge base is another search form, where I'm prompted to enter the business name and the state. If I do so – never mind users who don't know what state Apple's is headquartered in – I'm given a blank results page.

The traditional AltaVista hit list proclaims:

None of the first 10 hits belong to Apple or apple.com. One could imagine yet another alliance – say, with Switchboard – or, AltaVista may want to take a page out of Infoseek's book, and offer specialized handling to the names of the Fortune 500 companies. (For an example, go visit Infoseek and enter the word "Intel.")

The Apple Computer example inspired me to ask Jeeves if he knew about his new partner, so I went to www.aj.com and asked:

What is AltaVista?

I was pleased to see that Jeeves knows about his competitors – and his new colleague. It offered:

The best efforts of Jeeves and AltaVista still haven't quite taken us to the point where the naive user can interact with the search service the same way one might ask a human reference librarian for a piece of information. But we're getting closer.

Winners

Other winners include those Web sites that are pointed to by the Jeeves database. If your site happens to have been identified by the Jeeves researchers as answering a popular question, your hit count is likely to increase dramatically. The folks who run the ucar.edu site that answers "Why is the sky blue?" are likely to see a huge increase in hits. AltaVista's 30 million users a day will usually see suggested Jeeves answers before the linear hit list, and thus the editorial decisions of the builders of the Jeeves knowledge base will have increased tremendously in value.

In fact, one can imagine pressure on the Jeeves company to sell slots in the Jeeves knowledge base to content providers whose informational sites benefit directly or indirectly from higher hit counts.

Presumably users are also winners, assuming the Jeeves integration really does provide faster paths to the answers they seek.

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