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It's makeover time for Ask.com's avuncular mascot Jeeves the butler: on Monday the search site is sporting a new look with improvements and additions ranging from graphics, news, and more sophisticated search tools to a spell-checker for queries.

The upgrades are aimed at carving a niche in the crowded search market, where the company hopes to distinguish itself by offering what it calls "Smart Search" options.

"We've made the experience more intuitive and responsive," says Daniel Read, director of product development at Ask Jeeves. The move is also an attempt be more competitive in the fast-moving Internet search market, he said. It's the first major upgrade in about a year for Ask Jeeves.

Better, Faster Answers

As part of its new approach, Ask Jeeves has partnered with image repository Picsearch to deliver images inside search results. For example, when you search for "Adrien Brody," images of Brody appear at the top of your query results.

A similar partnership with the news service Moreover Technologies allows you to scour 4000 news sources for topical information. The news tools turns up headlines as well as links to the information on the subject. For example, on a search for the "capital of Ohio," the answer "Columbus" appears inside the search results as well as links to articles and sites.

Ask Jeeves has also added more links to its related search options, so users can refine or further explore a subject. It has added clarification tools to help users distinguish between similarly named subjects. While searching for the word "jaguar," for example, a user would be asked to clarify whether the reference is to the animal, the sports team, or the car.

Net Savvy, Typo-Safe

The Smart Search tools also include a spell-checker to recognize misspelled words and offer corrections. The selection now provides popular subject search for driving directions, Zip code search, and language translation.

The Ask.com site was also redesigned to load 50 percent faster than previously, Read says.

The upgrades build on Ask Jeeves' natural language processing technology, which enables users to search in a question format and receive results. This query format has been one of Ask Jeeves' distinguishing features in the search market, and has led some to label Jeeves' users as Internet novices.

The company dismisses these characterization, however, citing a February 2003 Nielsen NetRatings survey that says it boasts more than 13 million unique users and performs more than 5 million searches each day, making it the number two search engine behind leader Google.

"The popular misconception of Ask Jeeves' users as newbies couldn't be further from the truth. We know that we have a lot of experienced users," Read said.

Going After Google

While Google has captured a large audience of Net users with its detailed search and quirky style, a host of other search providers are also busy updating their engines to try to get a piece of the market.

Yahoo recently launched a new search site in an effort to get back to its search roots. The portal has recently pursued other revenue through paid services.

Representatives of Ask Jeeves say they hope their site can compete with these search competitors by offering a more responsive approach that addresses users' different query styles.

"What we've found is that people have different search needs. Sometimes they are looking to explore and sometimes they are looking for a shortcut to an answer," Read said. "We've produced a major upgrade to react to these user needs."

Tom Spring of PCWorld.com contributed to this report.

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