Oh Jeeves!

I heard today that www.ask.com is dropping it's well known butler mascot. This reopened my memories from far back when I first started using the Internet. I started using the net first when I was in college, in 1997. The SJCE-STEP was the only place in Mysore with internet access. Around ten 286 and 386 PCs shared a dial-up speed connection and we surfed the web using Netscape Navigator 4.x, which used to take hardly 2 to 3 minutes to load when starting up. As part of our intense research for our college project, we would go to rocketmail.com or mailcity.com and send 'test' e-mails to our friends sitting at another PC across the hall. After this, we would run to our friends to see if the mail really reached! Once in a while mails would reach, and by then our quota of 1 hour of browsing would be over. We would return home with an aura around us of having tamed the net.

Almost all our searches were done on Altavista, because we did not know any other search engine. I came to know that there was something called lycos when they bought over mailcity. Sometime during 99 I discovered askjeeves. ask.com was known as askjeeves.com during then (roughly 99-2000) and it was my favorite search engine. I don't know why, I just liked it's interface and I was happy with the search results it threw up. All this until I surrendered to google, like millions of others. I can't think of ask.com without Jeeves mascot. To me it is like google without it's colorful letters, IBM without it's 8-bar logo, Mysore without Chamundi hill, pizza without cheese! I will miss you Jeeves!

Talking about the internet, it is interesting to see how it has progressed in all these years. These days you can open a mail account on hundreds of websites and effortlessly receive thousands of spam mails every day. You can search for just about anything and google will return a couple of hundred thousand results in 0.00234 seconds or something around that. It is nice to see people making best use of the search engine technology to search for - Pamela Anderson. Yes. Lycos says the most searched phrase on their search engine in the last ten years was this woman! She fought off a close battle with "Britney Spears", "Las Vegas", "WWE", "Pokemon" and so on.