WeboLobby - All About Webs and Technology

Internet Search engine Ask is reverting to its original name, Ask Jeeves, as it reintroduces the iconic fictional butler into its corporate branding. English butler who serves up answers to search queries, saying its British users missed him after the company dropped him three years ago.

Ask is returning to its original name, "Ask Jeeves", in Britain, and is launching a multi-million-pound advertising campaign on Monday featuring an updated, three-dimensional and less servile Jeeves than his previous incarnation.

The search engine has been through a series of rebrands so Jeeves will appear on TV advertising this week and will also have a Facebook profile and Twitter account, the company said. He is only returning to the UK site of Ask.com.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching. On September 23, 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006 the character disappeared from Ask.com. Now the character is returning in Ask.com

Ask is struggling, as all search engines other than Google which having 90% of the market share, so the other search engines - Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask to name but a few - are all trying to grab a share of the remaining 10%.

Ask, a unit of Barry Diller's Internet media company IAC/InterActive Corp, says it has stabilised its British base at 15 million users per month by improving the relevance and speed of the results it delivers and its user-friendliness. In the United States, Ask is the fourth-most popular search engine after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft with 3.8 percent of the market, according to industry tracker ComScore.