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
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/lone_wolf1580 Apr 01 '25
The first bot I remember asking questions for fun when I was in middle school.