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CLICKS & MISSES By Larry Armstrong July 9, 1999


This Jeeves, Alas, Is a Rather Bumbling Butler
Ask Jeeves was outclassed by the big-name search engines -- and was as clumsy with a jeroboam of wine as with a Diamond Rio

When I think of butlers, what comes to mind is the stoic, loyal manservant who almost invisibly runs the household. The butler relieves his master of pesky day-to-day decisions and serves as the confidant who never criticizes. Almost invariably, he makes the right choice (except perhaps in those rare instances when "the butler did it.") And he always speaks with a clipped British accent -- but only when spoken to.

So when I heard that a butler was available on the Internet, in the form of the new Web-search site Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com), I had to check him out. I needed to see whether he could live up to the likes of Cantinflas as Passepartout or John Gielgud as Hobson, the movie butlers (from Around the World in 80 Days and Arthur, respectively) of my youth. Who better, I thought, to resolve those nagging questions that I could never pose to mere friends? Questions like, "Why can't I wear brown shoes with a blue suit?"

Perhaps my expectations were too high. Ask Jeeves is a search engine that promises to respond to questions users write in natural English instead of using the keywords, or, worse, Boolean expressions that other search engines require. Jeeves's goal is to provide more precise search results than do regular search sites by asking you follow-up questions to narrow the field of possible answers. I was confident that Jeeves would meet my requiremenents. After all, he came with the highest recommendations: When Ask Jeeves Inc. went public on July 1, its stock almost quintupuled on the first day.

 

He had the temerity to suggest that his ignorance was my fault, that I had misspelled something in my request
 

But what a bumbling butler this is. In our initial (if virtual) interview, I asked a series of questions of the who, what, when, where, and why variety. Many questions he simply ignored, delivering no answer at all. For some, he had the temerity to suggest that his ignorance was my fault, that I had misspelled something in my request. To his credit, after he took his feeble stab at a response, he submitted my questions to a handful of better-known search engines, though he says he filters those "finds" to get rid of the junk. Separately, I did searches on AltaVista, HotBot, Excite, and Yahoo! to compare Jeeves's skill with their results. And I used Dogpile, a site that, like Ask Jeeves, aggregrates results from other searches.

My first question was, "Who is John Crean?" Crean, who certainly can afford a butler of his own, is the founder and former chairman of RV maker Fleetwood Enterprises. He also has his own cooking show on a Southern California public television station. Jeeves drew a blank, as did HotBot. The other search engines managed to link Crean to both the company and the show on their first page of results. Yahoo! led the way, with nine correct responses.

Then I asked "How do I make paella?" Jeeves took a pass on this one, too. His referrals to other search engines turned up a mixed bag, in several languages, of recipes, restaurants, and paella pans. By far the best results came from my separate inquiry to AltaVista, which also invites searches in question form. Its first 10 hits produced seven different recipes, which is what I really was looking for.

Jeeves did better with the straightforward "What is the meaning of 'hubris?'" But it was a tedious procedure. First, it asked if I was looking for a definition. When I confirmed that I was, it linked me to Merriam-Webster's dictionary site, where I had to type the word in again. The other search engines produced a confusing array of Web sites that used the word in their title or text. AltaVista, however, again scored big: Its first link took me directly to the definition.

 TAKING KICKBACKS? How does Ask Jeeves handle shopping questions? In the real world, and even in the movie world, taking under-the-table kickbacks from merchants would be grounds for dismissal. Jeeves is cheerfully up-front about the fact that he takes from online stores: He offers his services to me for free, and even a virtual butler has to make a living, I suppose. I was looking for one of those Walkman-like devices that can play back music downloaded from the Internet, so I asked, "Where can I buy a Rio MP3 player?"

I shouldn't have been shocked when Jeeves whisked me off to the Web site of Sharper Image, that provisioner of gadgets and gizmos with the most royal of prices. But in his quest for a handsome commission, Jeeves outfoxed himself. The upscale merchant didn't even carry the players. The ordinary search engines came up with any number of online stores, with Yahoo! and AltaVista even providing a link to the automated shopping bot site www.bottomdollar.com, where I could search out the supplier with the lowest price. A proper butler would have known that that's more my style.

 

My advice? If you need a search engine, use a search engine. If you need a butler, find a real one.
 

I continued on with my series of questions, but in most cases Jeeves was outclassed by his more mundane brethren. Why bother to articulate my search as a question when I can type in a few keywords and get far richer results? For example, Jeeves rephrased my question "When was the telephone invented?" to "Who invented the telephone?" and gave me a cursory biography of Alexander Graham Bell. Other search engines turned up fascinating links that delved into the controversy surrounding the invention (a second patent arrived an hour after Bell's), the second language spoken over Bell's device (Japanese), and how a Kansas City funeral director came to invent the rotary phone.

Finally, I asked Jeeves how many liters were in a jeroboam, something every respectable butler should know off the top of his head. Jeeves came up with a metric conversion table -- useless because jeroboam isn't even a metric measurement. He also provided an even more useless calculator that could turn British gallons into bushels, for example. When I typed "jeroboam" into search engine sites, I knew I'd get a lot of biblical citations, but I got almost as many wining and dining links that gave the correct answer (3 liters or 4.5 liters, depending on whether one is pouring a conventional or sparkling wine.)

Finally, out of sheer frustration and in search of the real thing, I finally logged on to www.butlersguild.com, the Web site of the International Guild of Professional Butlers. It, too, has an "Ask Jeeves" feature, but this one is an E-mail link, presumably to a real butler ready to field questions of etiquette. I shot off my question. The next day I received a response listing all bottle sizes. He also suggested that while I could probably pour from a three-liter jeroboam at the table, he politely admonished me that there'd be a "fair chance" I'd ruin the tablecloth.

My advice? If you need a search engine, use a search engine. If you need a butler, find a real one. This Jeeves can handle neither job with the confidence and savoir-faire of a professional.

Armstrong -- who, alas, sometimes wears brown shoes with blue suits -- covers technology for Business Week in Los Angeles.


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WEB POINTERS
 Read our review, then try the sites:
Ask Jeeves
Professional Butlers



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