Hot take: I used to think those old 'Ask Jeeves' search results were a joke, but a 2001 forum post made me see them differently.

I was digging through an old tech help forum archive from like 2002, and someone was seriously asking how to fix a 'blue screen of death' error. The top reply, with a bunch of thanks, just said 'Ask Jeeves.' For years, I laughed at that as the dumbest, most useless advice ever. But then I read the whole thread. The original poster came back a week later and said it actually worked, because typing the exact error into Ask Jeeves led him to a Microsoft support page with the fix. It hit me that I was judging old web culture by today's standards. Back then, just telling someone *where* to look was a legit help, not a brush-off. It totally changed how I read those old 'just google it' style replies. Has anyone else found an old post that made a common joke seem way more useful in context?

2 comments

2 Comments

sethk4310h ago

Ask Jeeves" wasn't the joke, our modern view of it is.

maxp688h ago

Yeah, the part about "our modern view of it" is spot on. I read an article a while back about how it actually worked pretty well for its time. It let you ask full questions instead of just typing keywords. It feels silly now because Google got so much better, but back then it wasn't a total joke. It was just a different way to try and find stuff online that made sense to people. We look back and laugh because the tech moved so fast.