Website Launch

In April 1997, we officially launched the Ask Jeeves website. With the help of PR Consultant Sylvia Paul (who was kindly assisting us for free), we put out a press release announcing AskJeeves.com. We also entered our URL in various sites, like AOL and Yahoo!, for potential inclusion in their web directories. A few days later, we saw a surge in traffic, and investigating we discovered AslJeeves.com was a Yahoo! "Pick of the Week". From there, we started to get some modest coverage, including being contacted to go on talk radio shows. The internet was new and fresh and Ask Jeeves was a novel entry with its character based, question answering approach.

Over the following months, we saw AskJeeves.com rise in the rankings of the most popular websites. Although still far down on the list, the site was rising steadily and rapidly. This was all organic traffic from word of mouth and guerilla marketing, as the company had no marketing budget at the time.