AskJeeves logos, 1996–2007. 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 Ask Jeeves: Servants as Search Engines MARKUS KRAJEWSKI TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY CHARLES MARCRUM II If there’s something you’d like to try Ask me—I won’t say “no”—how could I? —The Smiths, “Ask,” 1986 1. AskJeeves: On the Poetics of Search Engines Imagine the year is 1923. You are Bertie Wooster, an affluent English bachelor from the better circles of the London upper class. A sizable fortune ensures your livelihood without need for further assistance or bothersome intervention. Along with your servant Jeeves, your gentle - man’s personal gentleman , you occupy a spacious flat in Westminster. You want for nothing and have the freedom, barring occasional familial and social commitments, to while away your days in idleness, a pursuit in which Jeeves assists in his idiosyncratic way. Imagine the year is 1996. The Internet hype has only just begun to develop, and you face the quandary of finding a name for a splendid idea of a search engine, which you have already fleshed out as a concept and for which you have even procured venture capital. The central idea of your search engine consists in the user’s ability to pose queries in nat - ural—that is to say, spoken—language, which is a particular advantage compared to the keyword entry common to date, a search method that evokes the use and imagery of a lexicon. You need instead something like the figure of a virtual interlocutor, as omniscient as possible, on whom one can rely to answer all manner of questions with aplomb. You remember a cheerful text in which a highly independent servant named Reginald Jeeves not only is capable of giving effectual advice for all vital issues but is, in his classically discreet manner, in command of the great art of anticipation and wise foresight. This servant would answer any and all of your visitor’s questions. Without further ado, you christen your company and its corresponding website AskJeeves. Your choice seems to have been well made. Internet users are taking advantage of your service, your search engine is in demand, and you have the fortune of observing a nearly unprecedented success story: Within two years, annual sales multiply one-hundred-fold, the company becomes Grey Room 38, Winter 2010, pp. 6–19. © 2010 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 a multimillion-dollar enterprise, enters the stock market, and achieves at its height a value of $190 per share. The number of visitors to the website continues to increase. Jeeves has his hands full answering their inquiries. Fourteen million different users a month make it a virtual space that ranks at number seventeen among the most-visited websites. In an unprece - dented advertising campaign, the logo is even to be found on apples and bananas. In other words, business is running smoothly. Then comes the year 2000, and this matchless success story is followed by an unrivaled stock market crash. Your numbers continue to move in the million range, in fact are at an unimaginable level, albeit now with a minus sign before the digits. To make matters worse, a new competitor by the name of Google has emerged and in short order succeeds in rendering its company name a verb. The AskJeeves success story takes on a humbler character from this point forward. As a result of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the company’s market value falls from $190 to $0.85 per share. The business is at least one of the few to succeed simply in surviving at a time when countless other Internet enterprises are failing. However, the initial expansion is a thing of the past. Even a gradual recovery has not allowed the company to catch up to the three top dogs: Google, Yahoo (named after a literary model from Gulliver’s Travels ), and the unprosaic MSN Search (later renamed Windows Live Search and then, more recently, Bing). The time has come for you to draw conclusions. The leadership is rapidly replaced several times; portions of the business are sold while additional elements are acquired. You follow a careful course of consolida - tion. A profound break in corporate politics occurs in 2005: on September 23 news reports reveal that Barry Diller, the new owner of the company, has directed that the name of the corporation be changed, that the icon of the company, the significant proper name Jeeves and his continually renewed logos, be retired as the corporate identity of the business. 1 This step is said to be necessary because literarily ignorant users allegedly inquired continuously as to the actual significance of Jeeves. Had they simply directed their question to the virtual Jeeves, he would surely have been quick to provide them both with an answer and a reference to the stories of P.G. Wodehouse. Moreover, the service portfolio of the search engine has, by this time, expanded in such a fashion (Toolbar, Picture Search, etc.) that communication in natural speech with a butler, even one as friendly and nearly all-knowing as Jeeves, no longer presents the appropriate context and corresponding visual world for the user inter - face. Critics claim, however, that the removal of Jeeves arises instead from a personal competitive relationship; indeed, as a result of the visual sim - ilarity of the new owner with the homemade iconification of Wodehouse’s literary figure. 2 8 Grey Room 38 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 In the final decade of the twentieth century, to elevate a servant to the position of icon of a global search engine may already seem an anachro - nism. However, the valet de chambre as a mode of function of a service economy had stood for a long time on the verge of vanishing, and seemed to have been surmounted, since the First World War at the latest, by more than just the decay depicted in Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday . Against this background the internal systemic changes (Diller’s takeover) and name changes of Ask.com may be regarded as only logical, particu - larly when that transition from humanoid media to things, as was char - acteristic of the nineteenth century, with its delegation of traditional services from the butler and valet to technical equipment, is duplicated in the virtual. Today, inquisitive Internet users may no longer direct their inquiries to a chimeric avatar figure in strange clothing but must instead find potential answers to their questions with the help, true to the do-it- yourself paradigm, of toolbars and other virtual toolboxes. With the change of system in 2006, the friendly suggestion of a humanoid steward in the virtual realm, a remnant of the world of yesterday, was removed in favor of the now universally unavoidable self-service . Even though this change took place within the physical world, such a step may easily be read as symptomatic of the need to eliminate a figure who is regarded as having nothing in common with the brave new economically molded computer world of today. If one is to assume that the motivations for a company to elevate a literary servant figure to poster-child status are in no way a result of a sudden nostalgia or sentimental memories of a pleasant evening read but rather follow systemic circumstances, then the question remains pre - cisely in what the analogy of a servant and a search engine consists and, not least, what reasons ultimately speak for the possible abandonment of this metaphorical imagery. 2. The Lord of Things: The Servant At first glance, to characterize the servant as an information center might seem idiosyncratic. Subordinates, most especially when fulfilling their function as messengers, are primarily categorized as carriers of knowl - edge, as secondary entities, or as laborers in subservient positions. Knowledge and the control over it grant authority and are thus the prin - ciple instruments of rule of the patriarch and the sovereign alike. However, the extent to which the subordinates actually find themselves in the corridors of power, how they not only participate in but actually direct and have confidently at their command the production of ruling Barry Diller and Reginald Jeeves. Krajewski | Ask Jeeves: Servants as Search Engines 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.6 by guest on 03 October 2021 knowledge , remains all too frequently neglected or even suppressed .3 The servant, even within the framework of his traditional functions, is granted a prominent position that enables him to gather and observe, sort and ana - lyze, differentiate and weigh, systematize and process, as well as scatter or selectively distribute all manner of information. That gentleman’s per - sonal gentlemen like Jeeves are never perplexed about an answer and con - sequently receive a great deal of agency is not a matter of chance. The knowledge of the domestic staff, male as well as female, is a primary agency of power .4 The three aspects that make the servant a privileged custodian and navigator of knowledge are his function as a hinge and intermediary between different spheres; a certain logic of economy that his services carry; and his institutionalization in the form of designated spaces that are consolidated into privileged contact points for the distribution of information.