Ask Jeeves UK steps up search battle with Smart Search

by Jennifer Whitehead,, Brand Republic 24-Feb-04, 08:00

LONDON - Ask Jeeves UK is stepping up the pressure on the search engine market as it reveals improvements to the technology powering its news and weather information searches.

The company has launched Smart Search, which combines natural-language processing and Teoma search technology to deliver selected contents and direct results for popular searches.

Smart Search is first being applied to Ask.co.uk's news and weather searches. Users can now search for news on a specific subject by adding the term "news" to queries.

The weather search will give users access to direct results about the weather in more than 130,000 locations around the world. The feature will also work on queries such as "Is it raining in London?" or "Weather in Paris in June", as well as time queries such as "time in New York".

Adrian Cox, CEO of Ask Jeeves UK, said: "Ask Jeeves understands that people search in different ways. The launch of Smart Search reflects this understanding, to deliver an enhanced user experience, making finding information on the web easier and more intuitive."

The move comes as Yahoo! revealed last week that it was rolling out its own search technology to replace that of Google. The two companies are increasingly competing for revenue from the growing paid-for search term market.

MSN is also reportedly developing its own technology to replace Google.

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