It has been well over three years since Ask.com decided to retire Jeeves, the well respected and trusted, search engine butler.

However, just like Take That and Spandau Ballet, Jeeves has been tempted out of retirement. For the time being, Jeeves will be restricting his comeback tour to purely UK search assignments and will be the new (albeit resurrected) brand behind the search engine. Apparently Jeeves has no immediate plans to travel overseas and is content, for the time being, to work diligently and tirelessly on behalf of us Brits.

When visiting Ask.com from within the UK you are presented with an updated 3D Jeeves character, which is a major improvement on the original 2D version.

I asked “Why has Jeeves returned” and received the following response to my search question:

“Jeeves is back!
Jeeves has been travelling the world for the past three years on a quest for the knowledge to answer all your questions. Now he is back with even more answers than ever - so go ahead and ask him anything!”

According to Cesar Mascaraque, managing director of Ask Jeeves Europe, Ask.com polled their UK users and realised that Jeeves still had an incredibly strong brand awareness of 83%, even after retiring, over three years ago. When compared to the current 72% awareness of Ask.com, bringing Jeeves back would seem a sensible move.

Ask.com is once again using its original “Ask Jeeves” brand for the UK market and will shortly be launching a multi million dollar Search Engine Advertising campaign across the UK to promote awareness that the butler is back. Jeeves will also be given his own Facebook fan page and Twitter account to help promote the message that he is back for good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 10:20 and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.