It wasn’t very PC, but you could ask Jeeves if he’s gay and get a snarky reply.
Here’s a bit of trivia (I worked for a startup that Ask Jeeves acquired back in 2000 & stayed on for a few more years):
There was a brief period of time where Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into search for porn. They went so far as to design a French maid caricature named Mimi that was to parallel the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. They even registered a bunch of domains like askmimi.com before finally deciding they didn’t want to risk damaging the Jeeves brand, and scratched the whole project.
Another bit of trivia: the CEO & executives at Jeeves when they acquired us were short-sighted idiots. One of the products my startup had developed was something we called “text ads” that let people bid on popular search terms for placement of ads along with the search results we served up. It was a fully automated system that required virtually no interaction on our part, and we considered it a license to print money. It brought in a good amount of revenue for us. After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.
The company that bought it made some improvements to it then re-launched it as Google AdWords, and Google quickly eclipsed Jeeves after that.
After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.
Wow. They really did die the hero instead of living long enough to become the villain.
They may be idiots, but they’re respectable idiots.
I didnt realize ask.com was still around.
Iremember when it launched… another relic of the old internet.
Can only imagine what the IP will be used for now
Use our new shiny Ask AI agent! Trained on double the stolen training data!
There was a time you asked Jeeves a question for the last time and never knew it 😔
I remember it. I asked it if Jeeves was gay, and he said that he prefers the term “jovial”. He was a treasure.
I’m surprised the Ask Jeeves brand never became an AI chatbot.
I WAS ABOUT TO SAY JUST THAT!!!
Are you s psychic?
Yes*
*some exclusions apply
Jeeves apparently was classier than that all the way until the end.
Its corpse undoubtedly will be.
I was thinking this as well. You would have thought they took the “Jeeves” as an agent name.
It’s a more meaningful assistant name than Siri or Alexa.
I’m thinking Siri and Alexa are meant to be more modern, young and hip. Jeeves as a butler has this very old man vibe to it.
It’s harder to pronounce internationally, which makes it a weaker global brand.
Also, in the early days of wakeword detection, the detection algorythm actually triggered by the ‘melody’ your voice creates automatically when producing certain vocal sounds. This basically triggered a recording before going through deeper analysis to actually determine, if this was supposed to be an actual request.
For Alexa, the a-ex-a is easy to detect. For “Hey Siri” it’s basically a ‘chime bing bing’ sound in a certain rythm. For Cortana, it’s or-a-a. But Jeeves is only a single syllable, both the J and ‘vs’ are harder to pronounce and basically not relevant for wakeword detection. So the whole wakeword is basically just “eee”, which is a bad wakeword.
So… Just not gold, both technically for reliability and efficiency and economically, not so great for global brand recognition.
“woke word detection” sounds like a feature on Truth Social.
It’s good to see they never sold out to some AI chatbot nonsense. Shame to see it go.
It was a garbage search engine, but a memorable one from the early web nonetheless.
Yeah, I remember disliking it back in the day (Alta Vista gang!!!🅰️♈), but I wish they evolved and got better rather than shutting down and I am still sad to see it go.
Dogpile.com was the best 😉
Another relic from '95 is still managing to keep a web presence.
My go-to was 37.com. It was a sad day when it closed down, like a decade ago.
Owned by these folks; https://system1.com/what-we-do
That used to be my search page of choice.
I expect the trademark will be for sale soon.
And that’s when it becomes AI slop?
Not that Jeeves was a very good search engine to begin with. But it’s a good way to ruin nostalgia and disrespect the past.
Facedeer’s just trolling as usual.
The truth of the matter is: we’re at the peak of AI innovation and subsidies, and if any company could demonstrate profitability by incorporating a modern LLM, this would have been it. And they didn’t.
PG Wodehouse would die again if he saw Jeeves become a digital effigy
It’s not about making money from his creation. He did that already. He would hate seeing Jeeves become a hollow shell of acquiescence instead of the cunning intermediary he was.
You’d think someone wasting money on AI would have snapped up this property. The brand is still a good fit for a chatbot.
I didn’t even realise Jeeves was still around! I remember using it in school before google existed.
altavista, lycos, infoseek, ask jeeves… i feel old.
Honestly, I forgot this site existed.
How are we now going to find things on the internet?
I’ve been asking myself that for like ten years now, since all the big search engines are just ad spam paid SEO and now AI bullshit.
I remember it being my first search engine after seeing a tv ad for it in the 90s.
Never thought about it for about 20 years but a little sad nonetheless.
As an Android user, I’ve been disappointed that they’ve never had a British male accent, at least in the US. I would be rather entertained to have my voice assistant respond like a polite but mildly annoyed butler.
I remember when everybody was using Ask. That was a long, long time ago.
Haven’t used it in years but this legitimately makes me sad for some reason.
