Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves provided a polite butler that answered questions asked in plain English up until 2005. He was booted and then they became just plain ol' ask.com. Their Internet search service covers the web, mobile, news and shopping. If there were no good matches in its own database, Jeeves offered up top LookSmart results. There was also an option to browse the Open Directory.

More information about them, from the website:

Ask.com's innovative technology scours the web to find answers where they exist online, then turns to a qualified Ask.com user when they don't. This means that if an answer to a question is published on the Web, we will find and deliver it in milliseconds, and we'll put the answer, not a link, at the very top of the page. But what if the question is too subjective for a machine to interpret correctly, or the answer has yet to be shared online? In those cases, we'll use our proprietary matching technology to route the question to a qualified Ask.com user who can help.

It's an okay service, but you need to be a community member to fully appreciate the service and that's no guarantee that you'll get the correct answer.

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