A 1999 press release boasted that “Jeeves” answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. “In the digital jungle of the year 2000, we come to him with our most probing questions,” remember the New York Times – whether Britney Spears or tamagotchis:
We asked him and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online valet who took us into the depths of cyberspace. Now, like so many relics of yesterday’s Internet, Jeeves (and his home, Ask.com) are no more. After nearly 30 years, the question-and-answer service and former search engine closed on Friday. “To you, the millions of users who have come to us for answers in a rapidly changing world, thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty and your trust,” the company said in a notice posted on its website. website now defunct…
Created in Berkeley, California, in the days of the dotcom gold rush, Ask Jeeves first appeared on computer screens in 1996… Its mascot, Jeeves, was inspired by the clever English butler character from PG Wodehouse’s famous book series. Its search function was simple: type a question and get an answer. But the quality of its responses was uneven and the website was quickly eclipsed by Google and Yahoo as the world’s leading search engines.
The site was purchased by InterActive Corp. for more than $1 billion in 2005 and received a cash injection to help it compete as a search engine. It changed its name to Ask.com, and as part of the reinvention, the site also dropped the Jeeves character. in 2006. Scrappy but inventive, the site was one of the first to introduce hyperlocal map overlays to its searches and incorporate web page thumbnails. “They’re doing a lot of smart, interesting things,” a Google executive noted on Ask.com at the time. Still, Ask.com struggled to compete and in 2010 returned to its daily bread: question and answer style prompts.
Even then, it failed against newer, more collaborative iterations like Quora and Google’s unwavering march towards the Internet: the platform now dominates the world’s search traffic and overall internet experience.
a statement on Ask.com ends “by thanking its millions of users and saying: ‘The spirit of Jeeves lives on,'” he notes this Engadget article:
As sad as it is to see a relic from the early days of the Internet fade into obscurity, we still have Ask Jeeves to thank for why some users still enter full questions when they query on Google. On top of that, Jeeves was created to provide detailed responses in natural language, which could have acted as a precursor to current AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
“Now, Ask.com joins an Internet graveyard that includes competitors like AltaVista, which closed in 2013,” the article notes. “With the demise of Ask.com, along with the demise of dial-up services AIM and AOL, we are truly coming to the end of a specific era of the Internet.”
and the New York Times maintains that the memory of Jeeves now lies somewhere between Limewire and Beanie Babies…
