Ask Jeeves is an Internet information retrieval company founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen. The original software was architected by Gary Chevsky. Ask Jeeves owns a variety of popular web destinations including ask.com, ask.co.uk, ajkids.com, teoma.com, excite.com, myway.com, iwon.com, bloglines.com and several others. The combined traffic to its properties places Ask Jeeves in the top ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was the ability to answer questions asked in natural language. Jeeves is the name of the "butler" (illustrated by Marcos Sorenson ), supposed to be the person who fetches you the answers of any query you ask. The character is commonly assumed to be based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional butler from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The company develops technologies for web-wide search, and competes with other search engine companies, such as Google and Yahoo!.

Ask Jeeves was the first commercial question-answering search engine for the World Wide Web. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English (natural language), as well as traditional keyword searching and strives to be more intuitive and user-friendly than other search engines.

Ask Jeeves-owned Teoma search technology uses subject-specific link popularity to compute "authoritativeness" of a search result. The Teoma technology also incorporates patented click popularity techniques, originally from DirectHit search engine, Ask Jeeves acquired in 2000.

Ask Jeeves stock has been trading on NASDAQ stock exchange since 1999, under the ticker symbol ASKJ..

In March 2005, Ask Jeeves was sold to IAC/InterActiveCorp, a media holding company founded and run by Barry Diller, for $1.85 billion.

See also: List of search engines

External links

• Ask.com - Ask Jeeves
• Ask.com Features
• Ask Jeeves Help Page
• The Official Ask Jeeves Weblog
• Ask Jeeves Desktop Search
• Ask Jeeves Toolbar