When I was little, I remember my mom using the Q&A site www.askjeeves.com when she needed to find something online. For those of you who aren't familiar with Ask Jeeves, the earliest version asked the user to input a question and it would provide results. When I was old enough to use the computer with my mom's help, she let me type in my own questions. As a kid, it was neat to think someone named Jeeves was on the other side of my computer screen, and he knew it all. How many teeth does a shark have? Ask Jeeves. When is the next full moon? Jeeves could tell you.
At that point in time, Internet was dial-up and Google didn't exist. Over the years, search engines transformed from question-based to search-based. Pretty soon, you didn't even have to search in question format, and now you have the ability to input only a few terms which will still return results. It's interesting to consider the transformation from asking questions to searching for answers. I googled the phrase "number of teeth in shark," and Google provided me the exact information I was looking for, and then some.
Ask Jeeves no longer exists in its original format; it's now ask.com, and it's nowhere near as popular as its competitors (who could compete with Google, anyway?). In the beginning of the Internet, users wanted simple answers to simple questions. Now, we use search engines for personal research on any given topic. Because of this, Q&A sites like the original askjeeves.com will never be as popular as they once were.
As for Jeeves, I'd say he's doing pretty well...
