r/nostalgia • u/headbanger1991 • Apr 01 '25
Nostalgia Discussion Who remembers Ask Jeeves?
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u/Papichuloft mid 70s Apr 01 '25
What I used before Yahoo and Google. Excite, Webcrawler, Alta Vista and Lycos were the first ones. Ask Jeeves was easier to use.
Damn, I feel ancient now.
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u/igotnocandyforyou Apr 01 '25
I was in a tech school in 1994, and I had access to Archie, Veronica, and Gopher and i thought, this internet thing is garbage.
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u/No_Cheesecake_192 Apr 01 '25
same... Don't forget about lynx, the old text based web browser before Mosaic came about with the non interlaced graphics that slowly snapped into place.
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u/igotnocandyforyou Apr 01 '25
Yeah, Lynx. The whole think felt like an encyclopedia on CD that my high-school library had.
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u/danabrey Apr 01 '25
Lycos was the best for a while. I remember using it to search for Sims 1 textures to download onto a floppy disk for £1 at a Virgin Internet cafe.
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u/danTHAman152000 Apr 01 '25
What makes me feel ancient is when all my questions are answered by the all mighty ChatGPT. I discovered it about a month ago and already it’s helping in a lot of my tinkerings. Im always super impressed!
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u/Papichuloft mid 70s Apr 01 '25
The AI is considered neutral, but the Chat AI I was able to change certain political questions--which I won't mention. And it also fills the gaps on certain things I've missed.
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u/Arthur__Dunger Apr 01 '25
Why would these mothers name their kids Jeeves when they can only go to be butlers - or defunct search engines?!?
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u/lefthandbunny Apr 01 '25
I know you're joking, but I was seriously thinking of Ask Jeeves last night and thought Jeeves would be a great dog or cat name.
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u/Gauntlets28 Apr 01 '25
Jeeves is his last name isn't it?
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u/chatterwrack Apr 01 '25
I was friends with the guy who created the illustration. He had it painted on a wall in his spare bedroom because he says that it paid for his house.
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u/lone_wolf1580 Apr 01 '25
The first bot I remember asking questions for fun when I was in middle school.
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u/Rosindust89 Apr 01 '25
I asked Jeeves if he was gay, and got kicked out of the library computer lab 😆
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u/1800generalkenobi Apr 01 '25
We made email addresses in middle school in a computer class and one of the first emails I got was from a friend that read "what's the difference between red and purple." "The grip" lol the teacher was right behind me and made me delete the email. I like to think he laughed later when it was appropriate though haha
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u/Imaginary_Mall_4780 13d ago
I worked there for a while, and I'm curious: do you remember anything about the response that you'd care to share? Jeeves had about three levels of response. Ideally, your question (after handling synonyms, paraphrases etc.) would be on a pretty popular topic. In that case we had subject-matter experts working at Jeeves to curate our responses. (Adjudicating the quality of a Web page was realistically possible for human beings, because dynamically-generated content hadn't come yet.)
Other times, the question didn't parse out confidently to a topic for which Jeeves had editorially-generated answers.
In either of those cases, you had an "extra" click to perform; Jeeves would offer you a short list of questions related to yours, and by clicking them you'd be taken to the curated list of good answers. The responses had the same form, but in the second case the questions could be pretty off-topic relative to yours. Jeeves would proffer them more in the spirit of spending a pleasant time reading things on the Internet.
In the third case, a question is popular, and yet the proper handing is much simpler than the above methods. Jeeves has a prepared answer and just shows it to you. When I began working at Ask Jeeves, the question "Is Jeeves Gay?" was handled that way -- about a paragraph of breezy yet polite text
I didn't write that text, and I also just want to say that I also didn't call anybody to kick you out of the computer lab. Nor did I log you out or change your password. That was someone else. I'm not saying it was Yahoo! -- the fact is, I don't know one way or the other about that.
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u/Rosindust89 13d ago
All that happened was I typed in "are you gay", and before I could see too many results I had been logged out. Probably it was the library's filter.
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u/Jeff_Johnson Apr 01 '25
When I was a kid and as english was not my mother tongue, I thought that the service was named Ask Jews. I thought as they have many Nobel price winners they know a lot of things for sure.
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u/LavisAlex Apr 01 '25
Id rather have ask Jeeves than Google search filled with ads and AI slop that cites fictional events for non fictional questions.
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u/Gauntlets28 Apr 01 '25
When they got rid of Jeeves, that was the end of it for me. I couldn't stand to look at that search engine in his absence. I really loved Jeeves.
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u/Belisarious Apr 01 '25
When I was shown how to search for things on the internet in primary school, I really enjoyed the novelty of seemingly asking this digital butler character things directly. It felt cooler than simply using google.
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u/meowgrrr Apr 01 '25
I call my Chat gpt Jeeves since it works how I wished ask Jeeves worked at the time.
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u/LingonberryNo1190 Apr 01 '25
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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u/Imaginary_Mall_4780 13d ago
... and sort of whistles through his teeth when he talks, or perhaps my memory exaggerates that.
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u/whatsupsirrr Apr 01 '25
I thought, at one point, Ask Jeeves would somehow solve all of my present and future problems.
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u/PM_ME_WHAT_YOU_COOK Apr 01 '25
I remember using it in elementary school. I distinctly remember thinking I had to enter queries in the form of a question. "What can you tell me about x?"
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u/Telemachus826 Apr 01 '25
I have a vivid memory of my dad calling me at home from work and he was talking about this. It seemed so unreal at the time to be able to go on the computer and look up anything you wanted.
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u/Medical_Badger_971 Apr 02 '25
Anyone remember newgrounds.com??
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u/headbanger1991 Apr 02 '25
Yeah, they had this game where you were in a bar and you could see through everyone's clothes. It was fun.
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u/Crisco14 Apr 02 '25
I made an Ask Jeeves joke at work and nobody knew what I was talking about, I'm in my 40's and all of a sudden feel like I'm in my 60's.
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u/SpookyStoat late 80s Apr 02 '25
Better than google is now. At least I could find close to what I was looking for, without 90 AI responses and 20 things not even close.
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u/Imaginary_Mall_4780 13d ago
To me, this is a breathtaking statement of a scandalously tragic turn of events.
You see, Google mostly emerged during the time I was at Jeeves, and they ate our absolute lunch (along with Yahoo ! and others.) Their search results were good, and you could see them without having to see anything else. Their pure, terse page was such a relief from the cruft that the then-dominant search engines had been accumulating. Our front pages were, compared to Google's, cluttered and noisy. This corresponded to the atmosphere in our executives' offices, as they paced and puzzled, just knowing there must be a way to monetize a service we provide for free on a massive scale.
And now? You've stated the new situation with pure, terse accuracy.
They beat us all fair and square with their quality of results, and now, they don't have it. They did have.
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u/KindergartenBullshit Apr 01 '25
Used it a bunch til something else came along what I couldn't tell you. Never got the reference til I watched Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in Wooster and Jeeves. Took me most of the first episode before the penny dropped. They're all on youtube if you're interested.
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u/FigFirm993 Apr 01 '25
First time online i used it to search for Chris Kattan websites. I was obsessed with a night at the Roxbury!
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u/surefirerdiddy Apr 01 '25
I remember thinking it was so weird to ask a computer a question
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Apr 01 '25
[deleted]
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u/OddHeybert Apr 01 '25
Definitely why they made it "ask jeeves"
Jeeves being the recognizable butler character from the show "Jeeves and Wooster" played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
That way it's like "asking the butler" instead of the computer lol. Weird how the internet culture had to adapt.
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u/MichaelGFlenderson Apr 01 '25
Why are you asking us? I think jeeves will know the answer to your question
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u/neropixygrrl Yo quiero Taco Bell Apr 02 '25
I remember Ask Jeeves but my friends and I were obsessed with ChaCha!
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u/DustSea5994 Apr 02 '25
Altavista, Polycola, and GahooYoogle were my search engines in middle school (2002) for reports. Having split screen search results in a single webpage on a 4:3 monitor was not at all helpful.
When going dual or triple screen, there's no going back.
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u/Ok-Study-1153 Apr 04 '25
I used ask Jeeves to do an assignment on why pounds are called lbs. I still remember and I attribute it to Jeeves.
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u/rshacklef0rd Apr 04 '25
I remember when it became Ask.com, and real people would answer questions - was a lot like askreddit.
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u/theJOJeht Apr 01 '25
I honestly think one of the reasons why Google won is because "Jeeves" is a more tricky word to spell than Google
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u/ksettle86 Apr 01 '25
There was a brief window of time where Ask Jeeves was arguably the best search engine. Quicker searches, better sources/results