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Aug 14, 2000

Ask Jeeves And Netscape's Open Directory Project Team To Bring Relevant And Comprehensive Search Results To Users

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and EMERYVILLE, Calif. (August 14, 2000) - Netscape Communications, a subsidiary of America Online (NYSE: AOL), and Ask Jeeves, Inc.(r) (NASDAQ: ASKJ), a leading provider of question answering technologies and services, announced today that Ask Jeeves has licensed Netscape's Open Directory Project (ODP) as the primary directory for its popular natural language question answering service at Ask.com. Through its intuitive, natural language question answering service, Ask Jeeves users now have access to the Internet's most relevant and comprehensive directory. The first Internet directory search service built by the Web community at large, the Open Directory Project empowers the Web community to review and categorize sites based on their area of interest and expertise. This announcement follows Netscape's announcement today that the Open Directory Project has grown to more than 2,000,000 sites in over 300,000 categories, doubling in size in under a year and making it the standard for Internet search directories. "Netscape is thrilled to provide Ask Jeeves' more than 14 million unique users with access to the largest, most relevant and comprehensive Internet directory anywhere," said Jim Martin, senior vice president and general manager of Netscape. "Ask Jeeves' natural-language processing and popularity search technology provide an excellent means for those searching for information to access the largest directory of Web sites." "Access to the Open Directory Project is a valuable and powerful resource for Ask Jeeves," said Sean Murphy, VP of products for Ask Jeeves. "With the integration of popularity technology, the Open Directory Project on Ask.com presents Ask Jeeves with another building block to provide the most efficient and effective question answering service for consumers worldwide." Through its Web properties and the more than 140 companies that use its technology, Ask Jeeves has an effective reach of more than 44 million Web users, or 64% of the global Internet population. Customers worldwide benefit from the relevant results provided by natural language question answering, human editorial judgment and award-winning popularity technology. Ask Jeeves' technology grows smarter over time by learning from every customer query and continuously improving the relevance of search results. The Open Directory Project delivers up-to-date and relevant search results by employing the industry's first freshness dating system delivering less than one-percent dead links. Consumers can easily recommend new sites for the directory and, with more than 28,000 contributors, new sites are quickly reviewed, categorized and added to the directory. Finally, Netscape helps facilitate communication in the Open Directory Project community with integration of the AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ services in addition to localized Editor tools in nine different languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Basque and Czech To promote its continued growth, Netscape makes the Open Directory Project available to anyone under a free use license. In addition to Ask Jeeves, more than one hundred leading Internet companies have licensed the directory including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Lycos, Google, HotBot, and InfoSpace.