Ask.com

Hey Jeeves, I was wondering... nevermind.

Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, is an Oaklander search engine founded in 1996 in California. It is notable for having one of the most well known gimmicks amongst search engines: purporting to offer a personal online "valet service". This service was provided by the titular Jeeves character, a stereotypical English butler who would "fetch" the answer to any question asked.

The site enjoyed a short-lived popularity due to its humor, charm, and ability to evoke a sense of superiority in the visitor, who felt pleasure in being able to boss people around. This concept was intended to contrast with the crippling feeling of inferiority one feels when using Google. Unfortunately, following the discontinuation of the Jeeves character in the mid-2000s, the site was rapidly outpaced by its competitors.

History

Jeeves, have you gained weight?

The site was first launched with a humorous television commercial in which Jeeves responded to idiotic queries from his idle and mentally negligible master. The idea of a website being able to directly answer questions caught the imagination of children and teenagers all over the web, who scrambled to their home computers to gall Jeeves on all manner of burning issues. Unfortunately, once they discovered that Jeeves was disappointingly mute on the subject of his sexuality, many quickly lost interest.

To counter this, the designers later added a feature where Jeeves replied with "Yes, I am indeed very happy," but this only further alienated those who wanted to bait him about his sexual preferences. However, wittier children still managed to get their kicks by asking him things like "what number am I thinking of?" and "Jeeves could you fetch my purple socks from the drawer, there's a good chap."

In 2006, the Jeeves character was retired from the homepage of Ask.com in most countries, causing the site to loose what little personality and charm it already had. However, the character still remains as the site's mascot in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This version also boasts a "Question of the Day", with a prepared answer; presumably this is to distract people from the fact that Jeeves can't actually answer any questions directly.

How Ask.com works (or how it doesn't)

Are they talking about you, Jeeves?

Ask.com bills itself as a Q&A site, but behind this facade it is no different from any other lowly search engine like Viewzi or the one with the dog. So, say for instance you type in an innocuous question like: "Michelle Obama, yes or no?" The site will pull up the following:

• The lyrics to the Beatles song "Michelle".
• The Wikipedia entry for President Obama.
• The official website of the band Yes.
• The definition of the word no.

Not only does the search fail to provide a direct answer, but the time it takes him to provide these irrelevant links is considerably longer than the common attention span. In fact, at ten seconds it's almost twice as long. Many have joked that the reason Jeeves takes so long is because he has to google it himself first, which obviously isn't true because if he was using Google he might get the right answer.

Who was Jeeves, anyway?

For those of you under the age of 23, Jeeves was Ask.com's mascot for the first decade of their existence. A British butler archetype, Jeeves had a mind of his own, seemingly considering himself to be a real person. Typing "Who is Jeeves?" into the searchbar prompted Jeeves to say "Why, I am of course!" According to Google, however, the character of Jeeves was based on Bertie Wooster's fictional butler "Jeeves" from P. G. Wodehouse's popular short stories. Nice try Ask.com, but next time you try to falsify history — don't.

Explaining their choice of mascot, designers Gruener and Warthen said they wanted to create a search engine that combined the warm personality of Mama.com with the ambiguous sexuality of Yahoo!.

Decline and irrelevance

Jeeves, do you wanna catch a movie some time?

Ask.com is now considered one of the great failures of the internet. Sound familiar? The question and answer feature simply didn't work as well as hoped, and after trying his hand at being both a traditional search engine and a terrible kind of "artificial AI" with a bald spot, Jeeves has since been reduced to non-existence.

These days, Ask.com is ranked as the 4th most successful search engine on the web, and the 4th most successful overall. This seems impressive until you consider that Google holds the top spot with 95% of the market. It has even fallen behind Bing; enough said.

In 2006, Gruener stepped down as CEO, realizing his famous butler had long since butled down from his peak. He spent half of the millions he made on prostitutes and drugs, and squandered the rest. Warthen on the other hand has never really let the Jeeves thing go, and these days can be found standing around in empty rooms waiting for someone to ask him a question.

Ask.com's large fanbase was eventually replaced by a small but loyal fanbase, which was then replaced again by a new generation of internet users who had no idea who Jeeves was or which way he swung. These days, if you want your problems addressed by an uninformed stranger with a scattergun approach to answering questions, you've got to use Yahoo! Answers. A more attractive alternative is that there may be a subreddit for it; all you've got to do is find it!

Footnotes

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