During a Goldman Sachs event in Manhattan, InterActive Corp’s Barry Diller indicated that the butler, Jeeves, will be getting axed:

Integrating Ask Jeeves into the company’s other businesses was a top priority for IAC, which also runs Ticketmaster and Match.Com. Diller didn’t say when Jeeves, who first hit the Internet in 1996, would disappear.

Actually, I think getting rid of the butler is a good move, as written back on June 1: “But putting a butler in with a search engine has always seemed too gimmicky to me. Yeah, it makes sense, but it’s kind of corny. ”

Why investing can be so risky
A few months ago I bought Ask Jeeves (ASKJ) stock. This was before the Diller/InterActive Corp buyout of Ask Jeeves. The news of the merger jumped the price/value of the stock 13.2% in one day. Life was good.

Once the deal actually went through, shareholders were offered some of IACI stock and some shares in Expedia (EXPE) stock in a spin-off. This was a real bummer to me because I invested in a search engine, not a freaking travel site, but that’s part of the breaks in the stock market when it comes to mergers and acquistions — sometimes they pay off, but sometimes they go south. Yeah, shareholders received more stock in the deal, but if that additional stock loses a significant amount of value then any financial gain evaporates. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line.

And guess what has happened to Expedia stock (downward spiral over last three months) with all this recent oil price spiking? Travel doesn’t seem to be on the rise. Yeah, travel sites are on the downward spiral! I would not have invested in Expedia or any travel site for that matter. I don’t believe in going to travel sites online because they often don’t have as good deals as the airlines direct/specials online. I don’t even like Expedia’s site or the idea behind it but now I either dump it and get out, or stick it out hoping that the travel site turns it around. I’m still ahead on the deal, but it’s feeling at the present time like watching water evaporate on the pavement on a blistering day. I don’t know how anybody could day trade — too stressful for a reasonably conservative investor like myself.

Anyway, too bad InterActive Corp didn’t do a spin-off with match.com on the NASDAQ. Yeah, the butler and I both could both have used some of that action (ok, he could use the match.com service, I just would have preferred that as stock over EXPEdia). Argh.

Are any Hmm readers sad to see the butler go? Anybody actually use ask.com for searches? I never found them to be in the same league as the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN), but I was impressed when they bought Bloglines. I still think the whole ask.com domain is a very good property. Probably not $1.85 billion hot, but that domain if used properly could become very, very valuable. Something like answers.com maybe.

Nice knowing ya, Jeeves.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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