Case Study No. 1044: Dr. Apostolos Gerasoulis (Wannabe Librarian)

Librarians and Ask.com
0:32
Ask.com TV ad
Tags: librarians search engines
Added: 7 years ago
From: vonjobi
Views: 3,828

[scene opens inside of a library, as "Dr. Apostolos Gerasoulis, creator of Ask.Com" appears on screen, then cut to a man standing and speaking directly to the camera]
APOSTOLOS: Librarians love Ask Dot Com, actually, because it could find information.
[cut to a closeup of a computer screen on the Ask Dot Com homepage]
APOSTOLOS: [from off camera] So they used, at that time, the technology that we built.
[cut back to Doctor Gerasoulis speaking directly to the camera]
APOSTOLOS: What the librarian does is that they're using more of a grouping of information. That's how they find information, and Ask Dot Com is the only engine which uses groups and collectiveness to find information.
[cut back to the computer screen as someone searches for Leonardo Da Vinci, then cut back to Doctor Gerasoulis speaking directly to the camera]
APOSTOLOS: If librarians love us, then I think the world should love us too ...
[cut to someone typing "Learning" into the Ask Dot Com search box]
APOSTOLOS: [from off camera] No fines on Ask Dot Com, this service is totally free!

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From libraryjournal.com:

I miss Jeeves. When Ask Jeeves dropped the butler and changed its name to become plain Ask.com, the Internet world lost a long-lived icon. For ten years, Jeeves represented the search engine company through major changes to its search technology. In its early days, Jeeves built a question-and-answer database and then matched search queries to one of the answers. It seemed like natural-language searching, as long as you asked the right question. As the web grew, Ask.com added in metasearching and ads, but its database failed to keep up. In 2001 the company bought a new search engine, Teoma, and embarked on significant changes to incorporate it and become the search engine it is today.

With the loss of Jeeves, the new star at Ask.com—or at least their television ads—is Apostolos Gerasoulis, one of Teoma's founders. In one of the ads, Gerasoulis is in the stacks of the library where he thought up the Teoma relevancy ranking and states that librarians love Ask.com. Given Ask.com's small market share, that claim certainly comes as a bit of a surprise. The most important question to ask, then, is just what there is to love about using Ask.com as a reference tool.