While he never married or had children, Jeeves is survived by his brother software butlers Jenkins and Alfred who have asked the public for privacy during this difficult time.
None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.
Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.
Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.
I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.
I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
AltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.
You could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.
Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.
This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.
as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.
During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.
Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.
> Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.
> Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.
As a millennial, the TV show with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was played when I was a kid, and I've rewatched it several times as an adult and read a few of the books. Our kids have watched the show with us too. I'm currently trying to learn the theme on the piano.
I'm sure it'll continue in some niche, much like Agatha Christie, where I've seen some recent youtube vids by younger people discovering how well they're written. I like it when they say "follows the old trope of ..." and then in the comments you get "doesn't follow it, invented it".
There are a few YouTube "can I solve [story] before the reveal?" style videos focusing on Agatha Christie novels ranging from around 4 years old to today.
I was in 4th grade in 2003 when I learned search engines existed (and I have a possibly tainted memory of our Computer Arts teacher in grade school explaining web crawlers and PageRank to us). We had a Gateway PC at home and AOL, but we weren't allowed to use anything networked (I only played Civ III).
But we were essentially taught to use multiple search engines, but that was AskJeeves, Yahoo!, and Google. We liked AskJeeves because of the whimsy. Yahoo! felt too adult and Google felt too much like adults pretending to be kids.
https://ask.com/ is my go-to site that I know will be up, but I know will not be in my DNS or browser cache. I use it as my "wait, is my internet really working" check.
I hope the domain lives on, and that I don't want to visit it.
I only know them as a consumer, but IAC is truly one of the most scourge-of-the-earth companies. They're retreating to publish People Magazine now, but they monopolized concert tickets as Ticketmaster, and online dating as a rollup of every mainstream app in the last 20y. They also bought CollegeHumor and drove it into the ground/irrelevance.
They're a terrible company. It's no surprise that AskJeeves failed, but society is better for it.
as I recall, they hired writers and freelancers who put together broad articles that got pointed too when you asked a question, instead of trying to answer questions individually... but my memory could be off, that was 20 years ago.
Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.
The guy who bought friendster.com lurks here
You have no idea how correct you are…
Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 as a natural language query model!
and until about 2000…some people preferred it!
Two years ago I made a rudimentary chatbot/agent for our long running IRC channel using the OpenAI API as the "brain". Its nickname is Jeeves.
“Jeeves’ spirit endures.”
This goes hard.
While he never married or had children, Jeeves is survived by his brother software butlers Jenkins and Alfred who have asked the public for privacy during this difficult time.
Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...
Was it ever good?
None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.
Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.
Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.
Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.
None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.
Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.
I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.
I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
AltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.
You could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.
And at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.
Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
Don't forget WebCrawler!
AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.
This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.
And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.
Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.
I very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.
as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.
WAS being given
They’re done.
During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.
I think that and dogpile were the best in that short area before google took off as the clear winner.
Between ‘97-2000, arguably.
Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.
> Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.
> Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Oh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
Careful you don't type an H instead of a G there.
[delayed]
Where do I buy it? Who wants to join me and buy it together?
End of an era
No shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?
Yeah, what is the recognition of Jeeves/Wooster among the millennials?
As a millennial, the TV show with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was played when I was a kid, and I've rewatched it several times as an adult and read a few of the books. Our kids have watched the show with us too. I'm currently trying to learn the theme on the piano.
I'm sure it'll continue in some niche, much like Agatha Christie, where I've seen some recent youtube vids by younger people discovering how well they're written. I like it when they say "follows the old trope of ..." and then in the comments you get "doesn't follow it, invented it".
There are a few YouTube "can I solve [story] before the reveal?" style videos focusing on Agatha Christie novels ranging from around 4 years old to today.
I was in 4th grade in 2003 when I learned search engines existed (and I have a possibly tainted memory of our Computer Arts teacher in grade school explaining web crawlers and PageRank to us). We had a Gateway PC at home and AOL, but we weren't allowed to use anything networked (I only played Civ III).
But we were essentially taught to use multiple search engines, but that was AskJeeves, Yahoo!, and Google. We liked AskJeeves because of the whimsy. Yahoo! felt too adult and Google felt too much like adults pretending to be kids.
https://ask.com/ is my go-to site that I know will be up, but I know will not be in my DNS or browser cache. I use it as my "wait, is my internet really working" check.
I hope the domain lives on, and that I don't want to visit it.
Mine is https://www.red.com/
Been using that for so many years now, probably 20ish? Oh wow, yup, I remember this page from 2006:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060505141837/http://www.red.co...
Yahoo.com should be your next one :)
I'd be willing to be ask.com will always resolve to a pingable IP address, that's a HOT domain name.
Aol.com for me.
I want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.
Would have been a great domain with the rise of AI, shocking they didn't adapt the persona.
Pour one out
Did they get a great deal for the domain from an AI lab?
Huh. https://www.askjeeves.com is that a spoof of ask.com?
I think they forgot about it
launched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!
I wonder what it was like working for them.
I only know them as a consumer, but IAC is truly one of the most scourge-of-the-earth companies. They're retreating to publish People Magazine now, but they monopolized concert tickets as Ticketmaster, and online dating as a rollup of every mainstream app in the last 20y. They also bought CollegeHumor and drove it into the ground/irrelevance.
They're a terrible company. It's no surprise that AskJeeves failed, but society is better for it.
as I recall, they hired writers and freelancers who put together broad articles that got pointed too when you asked a question, instead of trying to answer questions individually... but my memory could be off, that was 20 years ago.