June 10, 2004

Ask Jeeves's acquisition of software startup Tukaroo is an example of the kind of small transactions the company expects to continue to make, CFO Steve Sordello said.

Small buys like this one, which was announced Wednesday, won't affect the company's financial results but are "strategically important" as it works to strengthen its technology position for the search industry's coming battles, Sordello told a New York conference.

Ask Jeeves, of Emeryville, Calif., will acquire the assets of closely held Tukaroo, a San Jose, Calif., startup which develops specialized search software. Tukaroo was incorporated in 2003 and has not yet released any products on the market.

Terms were not disclosed. The acquisition is significant because it gives Ask Jeeves technology to allow consumers to quickly search for e-mails and files on their computers' hard drives.

Ask Jeeves' rivals are rushing into this area. Terra Lycos, the Internet unit of Spain's Telefonica SA, in March launched HotBot Desktop, free software that does that, besides handling Web searches.

Analysts and search-software makers who have talked with Google say they expect the company to release it's own desktop search tool before long.

Microsoft Corp.'s new search technology, expected later this year, will include improved ways of combing the hard drives of PCs. Microsoft is also building such functions into the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due around 2006.

In January, Tukaroo said it had completed technology for fast searches of files on a user's hard drive, local networks, and the Internet. It said it had developed so-called toolbar software to run on a user's computer.

Tukaroo also said it had come up with a new, better way to organize search results and a system to serve up advertisements to users.

Tukaroo was founded by Creighton Chong and Jeffrey Sidlosky, who have joined Ask Jeeves' staff.

Sordello told a conference hosted by Deutsche Bank that Ask Jeeves believes that technology will become an "even more critical component" of a competitive equation that also includes a fight for user traffic and advertisers targeting those users.

Ask Jeeves, which is now the No. 7 Web property based on users, has proprietary search technology, but gets advertisers through a partnership with Google.

Shares of Ask Jeeves closed at $38.45, down $2.17, or 5.3 percent, Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Source: Yahoo Finance

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.