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Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where Jeeves is the name of the "gentleman's gentleman", or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorenson), fetching you answers to any question you ask. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. As time wore on and keyword search engines such as Google rose to prominence, Ask Jeeves suffered a loss of many of its users. The technology was reworked to allow keyword searches as well, but by this time Ask Jeeves had dropped below Google, MSN, and Yahoo! in the size of their userbase.
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