Ask Jeeves is one of many Internet Search Engines. Even though they changed their name to ask.com a few years ago, Ask is still one of the easiest engines to use.
The Ask Jeeves search engine has been around for over 10 years now, but many Internet novices found the AskJeeves.com domain name easy to misspell. At one point, Jeeves was proclaimed to be the most often misspelled search engine on the Internet (Wordtracker reports that the misspelling "Geeves" still gets thousands of queries each day) .
Thus, in 2001 the company shortened its name and did away with its butler mascot to simply become "Ask.com." When you just ask Jeeves a question these days you really aren't asking "Jeeves" anything. What you ARE doing is using a powerful search engine that built its name and reputation on delivering answers to questions asked in natural, everyday language.
AskJeeves and Natural Language Searching
One of the big things that originally made just asking the Jeeves search engine a useful search tool was its pioneering use of inviting users to search using sentences and questions that we would use in normal everyday speech. Instead of asking Jeeves a boolean query such as "socks +size +15 +mens," a user could simply ask "Where can I buy socks for men with very large feet?"
Today, 11 years later, this may not seem revolutionary, but at the time of its introduction, Ask Jeeves was indeed just that.
The Best Search Engines, Meta Search Engines, and Video Search Engines
Since the introduction of natural language search by Ask Jeeves back in 1996, many other search engines have come along. While Google has clearly taken this round in the search engine wars, other meta search engines and specialized video search engines have also become quite popular.
Meta search engines seemed to be able to do something that Ask Jeeves could not, namely pull in search results from various other search engines, combining them to create a master list far bigger than what Ask could provide back in the late 1990's.
Ask, at that time, was limited by its own database. If a page was not inside the Ask database it would not appear in search results. The meta search engines and the young upstart named Google had techniques to find information that Ask simply did not have.
Thus, its popularity and usefulness (as well as the aforementioned spelling difficulties) began to make the search engine fall out of favor. For most users this continues even 6 years after Ask's attempt at renaming itself.
Another thorn in Ask Jeeves' side has been the growth of specialized search engines, such as Google Images and Yahoo Image Search, that have served to provide users with much higher degrees of accuracy and comfort. Ask.com has fought back with the introduction of its own specialized search spin-offs such as AskForKids.com.
While AskJeeves may seem less than popular these days, it does still provide a very valuable service to a respectable number of Internet users.
