The Price Is Right

Today we welcome one of the most knowledgable, and incredibly popular, luminaries in search to Ask Jeeves: Mr. Gary Price.

As Gary points out in his post on ResourceShelf, in the past five years he has gone from being one of Ask's biggest critics to one of our biggest fans. He's been a big supporter of our efforts, publicly and privately, during our "rebirth" period as a top search engine. In particular, Gary and Ask have shared a unique passion for the value of structured data sources in search.

Over time, it dawned on both of us that Gary could fulfill an important role internally at Ask, as we push forward with our endless roadmap of bringing these valuable sources of information to life. In his new position as Ask Jeeves' Director of Online Information Resources, Gary will not be a classic product manager, but he will be a close consultant to our product managers as they identify resources and implement them. In fact, we're very excited about having Gary's eyes on all of our products.

Secondly, Gary will represent Ask in reaching out to important information constituents such as the librarian and education communities. In doing so, Gary will be as active as ever on the lecture circuit, and he will continue to independently operate the ResourceShelf and DocuTicker websites. Gary has some good explanations of his plans at Ask, here.

Welcome aboard Gary. I'm looking forward to many music trivia battles over IM.

Jim Lanzone