Ask Jeeves is a search engine, however it is rather different to most that you might have used. Rather than entering the word or phrase that you are looking for, you enter a question. For instance, rather than entering “Olympics” you might enter “Which country has won the most medals in the Olympics?” This allows you to specify what you are looking for to a greater extent. Jeeves then responds with answers to certain questions. While these questions may not be the one you asked, they are on the same topic. If you click any of these questions it takes you to a site that answers that specific question. This is fantastic if you can get it to find the question you want, but this is a rarity. The kinds of questions it handles well are general ones such as “What is the population of the World?” This query found that specific question which sent me to a site, which had an up to the minute estimate. Not bad eh?

Questions are also customisable. For example, if you requested travel information for a country, one question it finds might give you choices between different areas of the country to get info on. This makes it more versatile. If Jeeves can’t find the question you were looking for, it also lists responses from other major search engines such as Yahoo and Lycos, which gives you additional options at your fingertips. As if this wasn’t enough, you can also get your question answered by a real person. This takes time, but the results are rather good. When you ask a question, Jeeves also suggests other questions to ask if your first fails. These questions are designed to work well with the engine and generally generate some useful answers, so this is a very handy feature.

With so many different parts to this site, all nicely integrated, this site will find what you want around 80% of the time. The only area it tends to fall down in is when searching for very obscure information, but it’s not really de
signed for that. So in conclusion, although the “ask a question” system doesn’t always work and isn’t always appropriate, the site as a whole is great, and should be your first port of call for all your searching needs.