Like actual butlers, this relic of the first dotcom boom has been a quaint anachronism for decades

In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites.

Then came Garrett Gruener, David Warthen, and Gary Chevsky, who together devised Ask Jeeves – a search engine that offered the chance to ask natural language questions to a cartoon character that looked like a Butler.

Like a real-life gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves would promptly and politely fetch whatever his master desired – in this case, a list of websites.

Ask Jeeves distinguished itself with its quirky approach, and in 1999 went public amid the stock market frenzy of the first dotcom boom. A year later it was laying off staff.

Search engines of the day relied on crawling the web and indexing it. In the late 1990s, Google started using its PageRank algorithm, which assessed the authoritativeness of sites based on ...