askjeeves.co.uk

The stately homes had one, the wealthy had one and now everybody can have one, their own personal butler. Not to fetch and carry in the real world but to do the fetching in cyberspace.

AskJeeves is a brilliant idea to help people find out about any subject under the sun and even on it.

Type in www.askjeeves.co.uk and you get a pale yellow box with Jeeves looking as if he is ready to do your bidding. As it says just above a text box all you need to do is type in a question and an answer will be forthcoming. Well not exactly the answer but a pointer to where you can get the answer to your question. So the longer your question then the greater the number of possible places where you can get your answer most of which will be irrelevant. The trick is to ask the right question in as few words as possible because Jeeves picks up on key words in your question and seeks out web sites with these key words.

Type in Lords when you want the Lords cricket ground and you will get everything but Lords cricket ground. Type in cricket grounds and that’s what you will get, cricket grounds one of which will be Lords.

The results of your query come in the form of a series of lines of text that can lead to further information and you have to do the searching but you are on the right track.

Further down the page are a handful of previously asked questions relating to your subject and one of these could be just what you are looking for. Further down still are matches via search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista etc.

So far, after using Jeeves for around six months on a fairly regular basis, I have never been disappointed and got what I was looking for every time although I had to do my bit too.

Just for the hell of it I have just done a search for myself and this is what I got. There were ten matches for James Buckley but I wasn’t one of them. But I did find out a little about my Christian.

Apparently James can be either a boy’s name or a girl’s name and both are derived from the Latin name Jacobus or Jacomus meaning “One who trips up another and takes his place.” I’m not sure I like the connotations of that. In Hebrew, Jacob or James comes from Yaakov. Sounds Russian to me.