Ask Jeeves, now known as Ask.com, is a question-and-answer E-business and Search Engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California.
Search engines are gateways to other sites that offer information, products, and services.
Ask Jeeves featured a well-dressed butler/ valet who seemingly fetched search results and was able to comprehend questions posed in ordinary everyday language rather than just using keywords.
Having created a famous e-business that managed a high volume of traffic, Warthen and Gruener collected fees from the corporate websites their search engine introduced to customers.
By October 1998, Ask Jeeves had about 300,000 searches per day, which increased to 1 million by May 1999 and 2 million by October 1999. The company took advantage of its relevance by completing an initial public offering (IPO) of stock, thus exposing the company to the public interest.
The company’s branding ideas involved sticking the Ask Jeeves logos on fruits like apples, oranges, e.t.c. It also involved sending a group of individuals dressed as butlers to neighborhoods and lunch locations where the likeness of the company’s icon has been seen.
Ask Jeeves lasted until 2005, then it was rebranded as Ask.com. The company tried to imitate Yahoo Answers territory by focusing on a real-person Q&A site, but Ask.com ended its incursion into search engineering in 2010, losing 130 search engineering jobs.
How Is Ask Jeeves Different From Google
Ask Jeeves and Google are both search engines but have slight differences. Ask.Jeeves/ Ask.com uses “ExpertRank,” An automated search algorithm that issues results according to topic communities and editorial functions that create ‘Smart Answers.’ while Google ranks pages according to popularity.
In addition, Ask.com puts its advertisements within the main content pane instead of in a separate right-hand pane like Google.
What Are Smart Answers
Ask Jeeves Smart Answer is an extension of their ideology of providing a natural language answer to users’ search queries. It does this through a combination of automated data mining and human editorial.
However, human editors don’t physically write the answers; instead, they act as aggregators and filters. Presently, only about 20% of Ask’s entire search terms and hundreds of categories have Smart Answers.
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