I am old enough to remember when Ask Jeeves was THE search engine of choice before the upstart Google emerged to rule the net. It was named after P.G. Woodhouse’s ubiquitous butler and one of its quirky characteristics was the polite way it answered your queries.

Then it all changed as Google began to dominate. Jeeves was dropped, the site changed to just Ask and disappeared down the hit list. Since then it has been playing catch-up without much success.

Today it has announced the return of the butler and a re-brand back to Ask Jeeves. What I am hoping this means is that it will return to it original ethos of answering questions rather than just being a search engine. It should concentrate on offering a different service because, as Yahoo, AOL et al, have already found – you cannot beat Google at its own game.

Thank you for reading this, Sir / Madam.