Ask Jeeves Acquires eTour

Ask Jeeves is bringing the worlds of web searching and web surfing closer together.

With the announcement yesterday of the Emeryville, Calif. company's acquisition of eTour, Ask Jeeves hopes the move will extend its vision of bringing its users a personalized experience.

"This is complementary to what we are already doing, and it creates incremental revenue sources," says Joshua Stylman, Ask Jeeves' vp of syndication and partnerships. "We are more geared toward the searcher, while eTour is more for the surfer.

"Currently we have a link to the eTour site. We're going to spend about 90 days seeing if we need to Jeeves-ify eTour.

Ask Jeeves also sees this as a means of increasing its bottom line.

"When you use eTour, you go in, check on your personal preferences, and then taken on a tour of sites that match your interests. And many sites pay to be a part of a tour.

"But we will have standards and practices for sites included on tours. We will make sure they meet certain criteria, so that they benefit the user on the tour."

As part of the asset acquisition, Ask Jeeves now owns the eTour.com web property, which has more than 4.5 million registered users and 370,000 daily unique; eTour's direct web site delivery engine, which provides users with guided tours of web sites based on their personal interests; a registration system that uses demographic information to deliver highly specific content.

Ask Jeeves also takes eTour's proprietary direct email marketing technology with 2.2 million unique newsletter subscribers and more than 450,000 opt-in special offer subscribers.

Insisting that users do not receive the emails unless they opt in, Stylman says users will receive messages that range from editorial, with information about new sites relating to their interests, to advertorial, with offers at such sites.

"Both [the tours and email marketing] are things Ask Jeeves has been dabbling with. The acquisition allows us to accelerate our plans, at a lower incremental cost."