Ask Jeeves Who?

I have never really used Ask Jeeves. Sure I used to use Yahoo and Metacrawler back in the days before I found Google, but I never gave Ask a chance. I even used Teoma a few years ago when I found out about it (I even met one of the people who worked on it at Rutgers) and I have since discovered that Ask Jeeves bought Teoma a while back. In fact Ask Jeeves runs a lot of big websites. Remember iWon.com? Excite? Ask Jeeves has one of the most impressive collections of services and technologies, and yet I never use it.

But why is that? Is it because the search results are below par? Is it because it’s hard to use? No, it’s because I have been seduced by Google. I no longer try things out for myself if Google has an alternative. I turn to Google for all of my answers. There is nothing wrong with that, but I feel there must be something else out there that I am missing.

And that is why today I decided to give Ask Jeeves an honest try. I will continue to use Gmail, but my default search engine will be Ask Jeeves. I have even added Ask Jeeves to my Firefox search box and set it as the default. I will run this try for the next few weeks, or until I can’t find the results I need on Ask Jeeves, and I will document my experiences as it becomes necessary. I will also post about some of the interesting things that Ask Jeeves has been doing lately, such as buying Bloglines.