Ask Jeeves 10th birthday

Project Info

Ask Jeeves was launched in 2000, and to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the leading question and answer search engine, we were asked by Ask.co.uk to create a website surrounding those seemingly ‘unanswerable’ questions that had been posed to Jeeves over the last decade. Examples of these unanswerable questions included; ‘What is the meaning of life?’, ‘Is there a God?’, ‘Do blondes have more fun?’, to more contemporary quandaries such as ‘Did Tony Soprano Die?’ The aim for Moonshine was to encourage the Ask community to get involved and come up with the answer to the un-answerables, whether funny or philosophical. There was an online engagement to win an iPad to encourage users to get involved with the competition, along with the draw of Ask signing up celebrities including hairdresser Nicky Clarke, TV presenter Sarah Beeny and astrologer Russell Grant to try to answer users’ queries. The celebrities in question each had a specific day assigned to them to publicise their individual ‘sessions’ affiliated with the site.The site was built as a bespoke theme, utilising the benefits of the built in SEO friendly features and a robust Content Management System (CMS). For every question, the user was asked to submit their best, most accurate, or most amusing response, to which other viewers of the site have the opportunity to give the entry either a thumbs up or a thumbs down by way of a bespoke voting mechanism.This enabled Moonshine to successfully moderate the competition entries and comments before they had the chance to be posted on various social networks. Once the moderated responses were posted online, viewers of the Un-answerables could then post selected ‘answers’ on their own personal social network sites, and if they so chose, ‘like’ Jeeves on Facebook and ‘follow’ the @askjeevesdotcom handle on Twitter.

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