Correct us if we are wrong, but we seem to have detected a certain half-veiled annoyance recently on the part of a British literary agency named A.P. Watt. The trouble is, these Watt chaps' duties include looking after the estate of the late, great comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse, creator of the supposedly inimitable butler Jeeves. Those duties are now being complicated by an enterprising U.S. company that since 1996 has made bags of money simply by styling itself "Ask Jeeves" and going into business as "the world's first Internet butler" -- apparently without remembering to "ask Watt" first. Dashed impertinent, really.
The cyber-Jeeves is actually very helpful. What it does is answer "natural-language" questions -- i.e., questions in plain English as opposed to the torturous "Boolean" that other search engines demand -- or at least "points the user to relevant Internet destinations that provide the answers." The book-Jeeves himself could hardly be more obliging. Potter off to www.askjeeves.com or www.ask.com with any query, no matter how frivolous ("Where can I find pictures of Bruce Willis?" someone was asking last week), and the site with the smiling-butler logo will pop you on the path to an answer.
Well, most of the time it will. With a bland imperturbability that would do the original Jeeves proud, it deflects the query "What do you know about A.P. Watt?" with: "I'm not sure I understood your question correctly. Would you like me to check your spelling?" And if you ask it about Wodehouse, you are suavely directed to reference works; the name is conspicuously absent from the site's own home page. Another visitor this week was more subtle, tossing this innocent hand grenade: "Where can I find a concise encyclopedia article about copyright?"