Don’t Ask Jeeves

As you may have heard, Ask.com ditched its long-time mascot Jeeves the dainty butler this week in order to update their visage. They now sport the ultra-clean "lots of white space" look that so many search engines are going for in the post-Google era. Can we take this as the final strike in the Death of the overcrowded Web Portal Landing Page™?

The redesign is part of bigger things afoot at Ask.com as they look to further incorporate the web publishing service Bloglines into their product line. Ask bought Bloglines last year. Here's the story from Wired News.

All of this activity made me suddenly nostalgic for Jeeves today. Not like I'll be staying up late tonight perusing Wodehouse or watching reruns of "Upstairs/Downstairs", but the death of the Internet's first (or at least "first prominent") fake human interface has me a little misty. Jeeves was remarkably learned, as well. He navigated the trickiest requests with ease, and never displayed a hint of snootiness. I can only imagine his quality response in that episode of The Simpsons when Bart threatened to ask him, "Why do you suck?"

I tried this query today:

And this is what I got:

Where is Jeeves?
After ten years of service, helping millions of users find what they want, Jeeves has decided to take a much-deserved retirement. He felt the time was right, convinced by the vastly-evolved technology of the new
Ask.com that he could take a well-earned rest from his duties of the previous decade. All of us at Ask.com wish him well in his next adventure.

Bye, Jeeves. We hardly knew ye.