Ask Jeeves breaks into packaged apps

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By Ann Bednarz

(IDG) -- Ask Jeeves Monday delivered its first packaged search application, JeevesOne.

First known as Web search site for consumers, Ask Jeeves expanded its repertoire three years ago to attract enterprise customers. The Emeryville, Calif. company took its natural language search technology and made it available as a hosted service so enterprise users could add self-help features to corporate Web sites, intranets and portals.

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Now, Ask Jeeves lets companies deploy the same functionality onsite with JeevesOne.

As with the original Ask Jeeves enterprise service, JeevesOne helps visitors find answers to their questions, posed in plain-English, on their own, taking the burden off corporate help desk employees and customer service reps. Analytic features track visitor behavior and report usage trends.

JeevesOne is designed for users who want greater administrative control than a hosted version provides. It ships with a suite of APIs so it can be integrated with existing customer relationship management and content management software, for example.

So-called Knowledge Packs also are available with JeevesOne. These pre-built components target specific industries - beginning with banking, brokerage, hardware, software, networking and data storage - and deliver product research and general customer support questions tailored to those industries. By pre-programming market-specific query structures, Ask Jeeves aims to speed implementation times.

JeevesOne supports Windows NT and Windows 2000 in its first iteration, available now. Support for additional platforms is under development, according to the company. Pricing starts at $100,000.