Search engine AskJeeves.com will stop its paid search inclusion program in August, six months after the company determined that the program could backfire as easily as it could augment online search.
The Site Submit program had become unnecessary thanks to improvements in the Ask Jeeves Teoma search index; specifically, its ability to crawl the Internet "comprehensively," the company said in a June 24 announcement.
Site Submit let Website owners pay an annual $30 fee for fast inclusion of each URL they submitted into the Teoma index. Ask Jeeves had cut back the Site Submit program in February, saying larger-scale testing of the program and its concept showed that it backfired too often, producing more commercial and irrelevant listings. Or, as product management vice president Jim Lanzone said at the time, "We're never going to mix church and state again.
Yahoo is also said to be mulling whether to do away with their own paid search inclusion program, one that offered annual fees for site review and a per-click rate each time a Yahoo visitor hit a client's listing in the search results. Google had already rejected such programs, citing, like Ask Jeeves, the programs’ potential to skew search results.
Meanwhile, Ask Jeeves has joined the free e-mail storage battle, saying they would fatten the available storage on its three portal brands – MyWay.com, Excite.com, and iWon.com – to 125 megabytes each, with Excite Gold users getting two gigabytes of storage as well. This not long after Yahoo upped the free e-mail ante by raising their free e-mail service's storage to 100MB.
"My Way, iWon and Excite all have extremely loyal users who deserve an e-mail product that is as robust as any other on the market," Ask Jeeves executive vice president and general manager for U.S. sites said in a statement. "The decision to offer our users a more compelling e-mail product is the first step in committing Ask Jeeves' resources to further build on the success of these brands."
AskJeeves acquired MyWay.com, Excite, and iWon in May, when it finished its deal to acquire Interactive Search Holdings. The new e-mail offerings will be available starting in September, and, as happened when Yahoo raised the capacity of its free e-mail storage, will be an automatic upgrade, with existing e-mail users not required to make any account changes.
AskJeeves will also make over 1 million dormant e-mail addresses available to new customers, the company said.
