Memo to Larry and Sergey: There's a butler available if you're looking for one

WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg uses the NCAA hoops tourney as the parallel for how an obscure contender can burst on the scene and go head-to-head with the more heralded "playahs". In the tournament, we have George Mason University. In the search-engines wars, Ask.com -- nee Ask Jeeves. Mossberg, like most of us never a big Jeeves fan, now compares Ask.com favorably to -- gasp --Google. Which is saying a whole helluva lot considering how far and how fast this new brand had to travel. The company basically fired the butler character "Jeeves" and woke up its marketing gene. But the transition from the butler to the minimalist Ask.com logo, according to Mossberg, transcended marketing. "Ask's search-results pages are richer and better organized than typical Google results, and they give greater priority to content over ads." In other words, they give you reasons to use it for searches, and advertisers reasons to buy. You gotta love the competition. "Google is still great", Mossberg said in his column today. "But Ask.com is well worth a try if you want to benefit from some features that go beyond Google." This time, the butler got shot.