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Ask Jeeves, The butler did it - 1997
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By the mid-1990s, the Internet was still largely the domain of gamers, researchers and computer aficionados. But out west in Berkeley, California, Garrett Greuner and David Warthen were wondering how to make it easier for everybody else to find things on the Internet and get answers to everyday and not so everyday questions, in effect, to humanize the search experience. After all, not everyone was trained in Boolean searches and syntax.

Their answer was Ask Jeeves, an internet search engine built around Natural Language Processing (NLP) which let users enter search queries in everyday language. NLP lets Ask Jeeves understand the context of the query and provide answers in a similar language. Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 complete with butler character Jeeves, developed by illustrator Marcos Sorenson.


Here is a growing archive of the search engine history:

  • 2003 – Microsoft redux
  • 2001 – Goodbye GoTo, hello Overture
  • 2000 – Some Web expertise
  • 1999 – A winning search concept
  • 1999 – Now that’s fast!
  • 1998 – Its a hit! DirectHit
  • 1998 – And in the other corner... MSN
  • 1998 – And in this corner… Google
  • 1998 – The Open (source) Directory Project
  • 1997 – Ask Jeeves, the butler did it
  • 1997 – GoTo, What do I bid?
  • 1996 – LookSmart – the Australian connection
  • 1996 – HotBot, one hot bot!
  • 1995/96 – The Northern Light
  • 1995 – AltaVista
  • 1995 – The Meta-search
  • 1994-95 – InfoSeek
  • 1994 – Lycos
  • 1994 – The WebCrawler
  • 1994 – Yahoo!
  • 1994 – A Galaxy of web pages
  • 1993 – The birth of Excite
  • 1993 - The Web’s oldest existing search engine
  • 1993 – The first web robot
  • 1993 - Archie’s pal, Jughead
  • 1993 - Veronica, the grandmother of search engines
  • 1989 - Archie, the grandfather of all search engines

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