Ask Jeeves
The search engine with a cartoon butler you asked full questions in plain English. Type "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" and Jeeves would fetch the answer — a friendlier face on the early web.
Ask Jeeves was founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California in 1996 and publicly launched in 1997. Its gimmick was natural-language search — instead of keywords, you could type an actual question — fronted by Jeeves, a cartoon butler named after P.G. Wodehouse's unflappable fictional valet, there to fetch you the answer.
The butler became the brand's whole identity during the dot-com boom, and Ask Jeeves was one of the more recognizable names of the early search era. The company acquired the Teoma search technology in 2001, and in July 2005 was itself bought by IAC for about $1.85 billion.
In 2006 the company rebranded to Ask.com and retired Jeeves, trading the beloved butler for a plainer identity — it didn't shut down so much as lose the character that made it memorable. Ask later abandoned its own search technology in 2010 to become more of a Q&A portal, but for '90s kids the enduring memory is the butler who took your questions.
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