On 6/23/07, Oren Beck orenbeck@gmail.com wrote:
IIRC "Ask" is the current incarnation of what used to be called "Jeeves" A naming that was intentionally evocative of an olde English butler. With cartoonish theming carrying the meme a bit to extreme for many users. The focus difference with "Jeeves" being that conversational queries were handled more gracefully than other search engines of that time could. With the results often being either very much spot on or weirdly way off. I used it for "game show" questions or soft searches like " how many cover versions of the Johnny Cash song "ring of fire" are there ?
Oren
That is the short of it. I just checked up on a few things and it was an Ask Jeeves co-founder that was on the board of Kozoru, and subsequently bought and moved the tech and the (unsold) servers and hardware to Cali. It seems that the Kozoru technology AIM-based BYOMS bot was working a few weeks ago, but it may be offline again now.
Jon.