Owner IAC says it’s discontinuing its search business.
Was Ask Jeeves the precursor to ChatGPT and other AI chat-based interfaces?
Ask Jeeves wasn’t really a proto-ChatGPT, it was a search box that tolerated full sentences and then dumped you into links. The “Jeeves” thing was basically branding to make search feel friendly, not an agent that could hold context or reason through a back-and-forth.
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Yeah, the “butler” was basically a mascot to make keyword search feel less nerdy. I mostly remember it as the site your aunt used because it felt polite, then you’d click the same ten blue links as everywhere else.
