Ask Jeeves is highly unusual as they are the only major search engine that supports "natural language" queries.

This means that rather than simply typing in a list of keywords and phrases, you can ask it a question as you would a human being, ie Why is the sky blue? or How does the Internet work?

Ask Jeeves have expanded by acquisition, and now own both DirectHit and Teoma.

DirectHit was a crawling search engine, very popular a couple of years ago that used a method called "click popularity" to help grade its results. The more people visited your site, the higher it rose in the rankings.

Teoma is a relative newcomer in the search market, but it was highly regarded for the very advanced technology it pioneered. Ask Jeeves now deliver Teoma enhanced results on the main .com site, and the .co.uk version.

Database

The main results come from the Ask Jeeves/DirectHit/Teoma database

Paid Listings

The "sponsored entries" come from the Google Web Site

Directory

Limited directory functions are provided as a list of the top 10 matching sites from LookSmart.com at the bottom of the page

Ask Jeeves Web Site