"We've got a large content base. And we're targeting the small-business person and the office manager," says Keith Butler, VP of Officedepot.com. "We needed a search vehicle that was both intuitive and could look across a wide array of data."

Ask Office Depot is simple to use and covers the large product database, Butler says. But there are other benefits, as well. The service--which runs on a single server at Office Depot and requires the part-time attention of a single employee--records every question asked and every response given so the search tool doubles as an online focus group that tracks questions and problems.

The results can point out problem areas previously unknown to site managers. "People kept asking about delivery. We thought we had done a good job peppering the site with information about delivery options," Butler says. "But obviously, we hadn't." Now, the site has extensive delivery information in the help area and features delivery tips throughout.

Forrester's Hagen says this feedback may be as valuable a contribution as any the search services make. Traditionally, Web chiefs looked at the paths users took through the site--known as clickstreams--to gauge site design and performance. "The problem with clickstreams is you don't know why people clicked the way they did. With search, people are giving you their reasons with the questions they ask," Hagen says. "There's a tremendous amount of learning you can take from search logs."

Reporting insight was a major factor in Iomega's decision to implement Ask Jeeves. "We wanted a closed-loop type system, where it would be easy to get decent reporting," says Iomega's Nikzad. "Now, I get a weekly report that tells me what people are asking that we didn't have answers for, and what percentage of customers pick the document that Jeeves suggests."

Implementing Ask Jeeves isn't a cheap, or an easy, solution. A typical business installation costs about $350,000 and can run as high as $1 million. Rental and maintenance of the service averages $100,000 to $200,000 annually after the first year. And while some other search services rely solely on an automated process that "crawls" and indexes the site on its own, Ask Jeeves is primarily a human process.

Ask Jeeves' management assembles a team of editors for every business project. After an initial automated indexing of the site, the team builds a core vocabulary of the site's key concepts. At a basketball site, for example, these words could include general concepts such as "points" and "rebounding," as well as specifics such as "Knicks" and "Latrell Sprewell."

Next, the editors write a document that defines what questions will be answered--How many points per game does Latrell Sprewell average? Are the Knicks better than the Bulls in rebounding? After that, Ask Jeeves' editors map the site's content to the questions--perhaps Basketball.net/play ers/sprewell for Sprewell's stats or Basketball.net/ teams/compare to analyze the Knicks' relative strength in rebounding.

The Ask Jeeves team also implements a language-analysis tool. Looking at word choice and grammar, this tool tries to match users' questions to the queries already written by the Ask Jeeves editors. The tool's interface is still a bit clunky, Forrester's Hagen says, because the service responds to a user's question with another question, which then is supposed to point the user to the appropriate Web page. But in many cases, the two questions don't correspond. On Office Depot's site, for example, the inquiry "Where can I find toner for my HP printer?" returns questions such as "Where can I read the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet Printing Supplies Compatibility Guide?" This is the closest match, but it's not as precise as it should be, analysts say.

"I've seen some anecdotal evidence that there's only a 30% to 40% hit rate," Hagen says. "That means 60% to 70% of questions aren't answered." Giga's Hall adds, "Ask Jeeves really works best for more-general questions."

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Illustration by Lisa Hernderling
Photo of Butler by Gary Laufman