Ask Jeeves turns 10 with plans to answer the unanswerable

Online search engine Ask Jeeves is celebrating its tenth anniversary by having a bit of fun and promoting its new community service.

After a decade on the web, during which time it's fair to say the site has had its ups and downs, Jeeves has apparently done his best to answer more than 1.1 billion questions, but there are still several that even the smartest algorithm would struggle with.

Ask Jeeves has therefore published its favourite ten 'unanswerable' questions of the last decade - questions such as "is there a God?", and "what is love?" - in order to encourage users to come up with suggested answers ahead of the launch of a new community section of the site.

The company has always struggled from a market share perspective in rivaling the search giants of Google, Yahoo, and now Bing, but it maintains that its technology is sound and that investments in semantic advances have improved relevancy immeasurably.

Most Ask Jeeves executives have always said that by focusing on search alone, unlike its key rivals, it has an opportunity to excel, so is the community service launch an indication that this policy is being slowly revised?

With Yahoo Answers and other sites such as WikiAnswers already well established, though, it may well be too little too late for the besuited butler.

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