|
It’s difficult to remember those dark days now, but not
so long ago the Internet was a chaotic, alien world where only
the bravest of ordinary citizens dared enter. Then in the mid-1990s
a pioneering band of search engines appeared, offering to guide
us through the wilderness. Ask Jeeves, the company founded by Garrett
Gruener and David Warthen in 1996, was one of those early trailbreakers.
Garrett Gruener and David Warthen engaged the Internet long before
most of us, and they knew it for the unruly, unrepentantly techie
beast it was. “I could see it was going to eventually be
the most important commercial structure out there,” says
Gruener, who spent a lot of time in the early ’90s plying
the pre-worldwide-web, bulletin board systems that provided regional
and international bases for playing games and exchanging messages
on the Internet. But, adds Warthen, “it wasn’t something
we could see our mothers using.”
To navigate the precommercial Internet, one needed a lot of patience
and a clear grasp of the Boolean logic that was behind the search
protocols of the time. Gruener thought there was a better way,
and he came up with an intriguing idea.
It wasn’t his first. Gruener, who had both a UCSD bachelor’s
and master’s (UC-Berkeley, ’77) in political science
with an emphasis on technology, had started two businesses by the
early ’80s. His first had never taken off, but his second,
a small communications software business in Berkeley called Virtual
Microsystems, had attracted venture money and achieved modest success.
He met Warthen in 1983 when the latter took a job at Virtual Microsystems,
after two years working as a programmer at NCR.
“Garrett coached me a lot,” says Warthen. “I started
off as a programmer, but soon I was running a project, then the
software group and next the engineering department. It was an incredible
learning experience.”
Though Warthen left the company after a few years to start a
desktop software company and then a software outsourcing business,
he and
Gruener remained friends and frequently got together for lunch
in Berkeley. It was at one of these sessions that Gruener first
shared with Warthen his idea for making the Internet a more user-friendly
place.
“I thought the Boolean search thing was way too complicated,” says
Gruener, who had sold Virtual Microsystems in 1986 and spent
the next few years consulting and looking for new ventures. “There
needed to be a way to access the network with more natural language.
And it should have personality.” He had a vision of a virtual
concierge who would do one’s bidding by answering questions
asked in everyday English. “I wasn’t sure most Americans
would know what a concierge was, so I settled on a butler,” he
says. He hadn’t read P.G. Wodehouse and wouldn’t
until years later, but he came up with Jeeves— Bertie Wooster’s
hyper-efficient, nearly omniscient valet in the Wodehouse novels.
In the summer of ’92, Gruener hired Gary Chevsky, a Berkeley
computer science undergrad, to help write a program and develop
prototypes for his question-and-answer search concept. “It
wasn’t Ask Jeeves yet,” says Warthen, who supervised
Chevsky’s work. “There was no character associated
with it, and the technology prototype was a crude demo with basic
string matching. But it showed the concept very clearly.”
Gruener pitched his idea to the venture firm that had helped
finance Virtual Microsystems. The partners, however, were more
interested
in hiring him. Gruener took the job at what is now Alta Partners,
but he was unwilling to let his butler quietly fade away. In
mid-’95,
during one of his lunches with Warthen, he expressed frustration
about getting anyone to develop his idea. “I told him, ‘I
think this is one of those ideas that if we don’t do it,
ten years from now we’ll be having one of these lunches and
we’ll say, ‘Remember when we had that really good idea?’” recalls
Warthen. “Then I said, ‘Why don’t I take the
ball and run with it?’”
Gruener agreed. Warthen reconnected with Chevsky, who was working
at Informix at the time, and convinced him to put together a
first version of the Jeeves software suite, in his spare time. “David
was really a technology visionary,” says Chevsky. “He
captured the moment and realized that the time was finally right
for this concept.”
By mid-1996, the infrastructure was strong enough to start a
company. “We
had a working demonstrable prototype and it seemed like the next
step was to buckle down and build the technology and the knowledge
base to the point that it was really deployable,” says Warthen.
Before incorporating in June of that year, Warthen lured Chevsky
away from Informix and hired three content editors. Warthen installed
them all in the squalid suite of offices on the second floor of
the University Avenue building in Berkeley where he had been running
his outsourcing company. “There were roaches, and there was
a constant stink from the Chinese Longlife Vegie House downstairs,” recalls
Chevsky. “The mesh-cage elevator was so ancient it required
a human operator.” Gruener and Warthen paid for everything,
including salaries, out of their own pockets. “David was
very generous,” says Chevsky with a laugh. “He got
me a folding bed just in case I decided to work all night.”
Everyone, especially Warthen, worked long hours building the
service’s
infrastructure. “Garrett refers to me as the technical founder,” Warthen
says. “But in truth I wound up being the entire management
team, half the engineering staff and the entire IT department for
15 months. My pager would go off when the server crashed. I was
the first salesperson, too.”
Editors Needed
The content editors’ mission was to build a knowledge base
of questions on pre-selected topics such as sports and celebrities. “We
created these little capsules of knowledge that we called question
templates,” says Warthen. “An editor would decide, ‘Here’s
a question that a lot of people are going to ask. I’m going
to go and figure out how best to answer it.’ Then she’d
put that answer in a little capsule of knowledge that users could
reuse over and over.” Meanwhile Warthen built a meta-search engine that would aggregate
search results from other traditional search engines in the event
that someone asked a question that the content editors hadn’t
anticipated. (A meta search is a query submitted to more than one
search engine or directory). “The topics we focused on changed
once we went live and got real-world feedback about what people
were really interested in,” say Warthen. “That allowed
us to focus more on the frequently asked questions.”
Ask Jeeves went live in April 1997, with a knowledge base of several
thousand answerable questions. At the time Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek,
Lycos and Alta Vista were operational but the competition went
far beyond that: One directory at the time listed over 250 search
engines. Ask Jeeves, however, “was something new,” says
Chris Sherman, senior editor of searchenginewatch.com, a search
industry news and analysis site. “Search in the early days
wasn’t very good. There were basically two approaches. One
was the search engine, where a computer would try to find everything
possible and create a big index. The other was the directory, where
human beings would look at web pages and write brief descriptions.
Ask Jeeves really tried to be something in the middle.”
The question-and-answer format was not the only difference between
Ask Jeeves and the other search engines on the web. Instead of
search results, a user got back a set of confirmation questions
that helped narrow his search. “If a user asked, ‘What’s
the best place to eat in San Francisco?’ he’d get back
a list of questions that basically told him that we know the answers
to these questions, such as, ‘What are the highest rated
restaurants in the Bay Area?’” says Chevsky. “He’d
then get a pull-down menu of different types of restaurants in,
say, the East Bay. The other thing that was different was that
the answers or search results were editorially selected. People
who would construct questions and answers in the area of food would
really be experts in that area.”
Because of its novel presentation and a few lucky breaks—it
was Yahoo’s “Pick of the Week” in its first week
online—Ask Jeeves quickly gained a cult following. “Jeeves
appealed to a segment of the population that was just learning
to use the Internet,” says Dan Miller of the Roda Group,
the venture firm that provided Ask Jeeves with angel financing
in late 1997. “These people were scared of getting 250,000
results, which was what was happening at the time. People would
hit you over the head if you tried to take Jeeves away from them.
It was the same kind of loyalty you see with Macintosh computers.
That’s one of the reasons we decided to invest, even though
most people thought the search space was already over.”
 PAGE2
|
