"Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me"

Ask Jeeves turns 8 today (err, yesterday actually), so they asked the oldest-timer to reminisce a bit.  Here we go.

Aaahhh, I remember the good old days (sigh)…

   

The allure of the Internet, the chance to affect millions of people every day, the promise of financial well-being before the age of 30.   When the company was first incorporated in June 1996, the staff consisted of Dave Warthen and Garrett Gruener, the two founders, plus me – the software architect - and three content editors, jammed in a couple of rooms in a historic building in downtown Berkeley, a block away from the Cal campus. 

It had all the glory of a startup - the greasy smell from a Chinese restaurant downstairs, the occasional cockroaches crawling across my desk, the turn-of-the-century elevator that required a human operator, the folding bed for sleeping in the office, and a bunch of people enthused about building something different.

Fast forward a year, it's April 1997, and we are taking Ask.com out of a friends-only beta.  The site is running off of two Dell servers under my desk, and I have a pager with me at all times of day and night, just in case the site crashes.  On occasion when I can't determine what's wrong, I hook my debugger up to the live boxes, set a breakpoint, and step through the code, against the live queries.  (For non-programmers out there, this means that the user would likely never get their response back). The thought of timing out a few users didn't generate as much paranoia back then as it would now.

After a few weeks, we have a couple of thousand queries a day.  Then Yahoo gives us a "Cool Pick of the Week" mention, and our traffic doubles (from 4K to 8K), then other people start noticing, and before long, we have 150K queries a day…and now we're talking to Dell about using our technology on their corporate site to answer tech support queries.  Then comes the deal with Altavista – the king of search – where they want to use us to answer popular questions.

Up until we had 80 people, my mom was still serving homemade lunches for everyone.  Before we knew it, we had a million queries a day, and it was 1998.  We moved to Parker Street in Berkeley, a nicer, bigger, more funky looking place, to suit the burgeoning hippie culture developing at Jeeves.  Dyed hair, bare feet, dogs roaming, people having feelings of invincibility, exploring lots of side projects, like "wouldn't it be great to have a personal Jeeves robot?" – it sure was delirious fun. 

   

Throughout 1998 and 1999, we went public, spent a lot of money on marketing, grew to 800 people, and I thought I'd be able to buy half of my native Russia.  Then the bubble burst, and now that's another Russian.

By 2001, we had shrunk down to 200 people and we were counting pennies to survive.  Search was changing.  Maybe we jumped the shark.  But the winds of change were in the air here too…

Who knew we'd be the Internet's biggest comeback story a few years later?  As most of you know who read this, Ask Jeeves is a very different product now than it was back then.  It is gratifying to see the awards and respect we get for being a top search engine and creating innovative features. (Maybe we unjumped the shark?) Some people still don't get it.  But hey, the Family Guy is back on primetime, and Ask Jeeves is back and competing with the big boys.  Go figure. 

Gary Chevsky - Senior Director, Site Engineering