Late December I posted an entry here named Ask Jeeves: The Little Engine That Could, where I aired out my concern with this search engine. The feedback was fabulous, and even Jim Lanzone (Senior Vice President) responded. Since then, Ask Jeeves has done a lot, including:
(1) TV Commercials (2) Discussions about Open Sourcing Search (3) Acquiring Bloglines (4) Increased communication through Ask Jeeves Blog and Jeeves Coming Out
And now I see that they have removed the 7 of the 10 top sponsored results. They have place only 3 top sponsored results at the top and then is showing those juicy natural results. I stumbled across this while defending Ask Jeeves at an SEO Chat thread. So I tested out a few random searches, such as iPod and I only get 3 sponsored results as such
So these results seem to be looking fine. Also, check out a search on What is Ask Jeeves?. Those "Related Topics" are very humorous. :)