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There were hosannahs among the stockholders of Ask Jeeves that week, but among admirers of the author P.G. Wodehouse the news was greeted with rather less enthusiasm. Their position is that the character of Jeeves, the all-knowing servant, belongs irrevocably to his creator, Wodehouse, the prolific British humorist.

Also Today A shot of the needful In which the P.G. Wodehouse newsgroup and its online version of Blandings Castle teaches me to play again. By Emily Jenkins

Wodehouse, who began his career at the turn of the century, wrote comic stories about amiable, vacuous, vaguely Edwardian young men who spent their days tossing rolls at each other at their London club, the Drones, their nights in nightclubs, and their weekends in country houses. In 1919, he needed a character to extricate his dim-witted hero, Bertie Wooster, from the light-headed predicaments in which he and his friends -- whose collective IQ is well within double digits -- invariably entangle themselves. In a flash of genius, Wodehouse decided to make Bertie's valet a mastermind.

He named him after Percy Jeeves, an English cricketer. Jeeves is there to bail Bertie out no matter what troubles he's getting into, or thinking of getting into: bad racing bet ("I should not advocate it, sir. The stable is not sanguine"), bad matrimonial plans ("I would always hesitate to recommend as a life's companion a young lady with such a vivid shade of red hair. Red hair, sir, is dangerous), and especially, bad sartorial choice ("Not the blue with the faint red stripe, sir"). By the late '20s, Jeeves was firmly established. Wodehouse wrote his first Jeeves book in 1923, and his last shortly before his death in 1974. In all, he produced 14 immensely popular books about the sagacious gentleman's gentleman.

Ask Jeeves does not have quite so long a pedigree. The company was founded in 1996, and launched its consumer site in 1997, and in 1998 it launched its corporate question asking service, which enables customers to ask specific questions of corporations, and includes among its clients Dell, Microsoft, Williams-Sonoma and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

For those who have not availed themselves of the service, the idea is this: you ask Jeeves a question in ordinary English (for example, "Who is the world's richest man?" He then directs you to several variations of your question. You click on the one that comes the closest to your intent, which is itself linked to the appropriate Web site. In this case, you'll reach The Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock.

That's how it works -- ideally. ABCNEWS.com has noted that "Questions remain about how effective the service is in providing accurate answers to a wide range of questions." Many people assert, however, that they have had excellent results using Ask Jeeves; that is, if 10 responses to a question are given, usually, five of them link to helpful Web sites, and it is not a difficult task to ignore the inappropriate ones.

"Ask Jeeves is about making your life easier," says Heather Staples, vice-president of corporate communications for the company. "It allows you to ask questions in plain English and get answers to most frequently asked questions." She estimates that the site answers more than 2.5 million questions per day.

Ask Jeeves creators Garrett Gruener and David Warthen wanted a name that would stand out and convey what the search engine would do. "They knew they wanted a butler character," explains Staples, "so they thought about lots of different names for butlers, everything from Hudson to Cadbury, and they ended up with Jeeves." And had they read P.G. Wodehouse? Says Staples, "I would imagine that they had, but I don't know for a fact."

Tony Ring, a founder of the Wodehouse Society in Britain, and author of several books on Wodehouse, is irked by the whole Jeeves-as-logo situation. He insists that the site initially did mention Wodehouse's creation as its inspiration.

Next page | Mum's the word from the Wodehouse estate