Goodbye, Jeeves!
InterActive Corp.'s Barry Diller will be taking Jeeves out of AskJeeves.com. That's, perhaps, indicative of confusion at Inter-Active Corp. over what to do with that site. What a waste of a perfectly good book character!
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It's a sad, sad season for P.G. Wodehouse fans. Jeeves, the smart butler from Wodehouse's books, will soon be leaving search engine AskJeeves.com. Which will no longer be called AskJeeves.com. Barry Diller, whose IAC/InterActive Corp. acquired the site only a few months ago, has recently announced that the site will be renamed due to user confusion over what Jeeves is and can do.
To my mind, this is simply indicative of Diller's confusion over what to do with AskJeeves.com. His company just spent $1.85 billion to purchase AskJeeves.com. The bulk of that must have paid for the brand name, AskJeeves.com -- and that money is now going into the waste basket.