Ask Jeeves is a singularly useless search engine, in my experience. I realize this is partly because Ask Jeeves wasn’t really created for people like me. I’m comfortable writing Boolean queries and crafting stupidly precise search strategies; Ask Jeeves, however, was created for newbies who their computer to talk like a human.

An incredibly weird human, mind you. Natural-language-parsing being what it is, Ask Jeeves functions less like an intelligent, nuanced human and more like a computer programmed by Jacques Derrida. The replies can be so strange that the wits at SatireWire recently decided to conduct an “interview” with Jeeves; the screenshots are here, and this is a sample:

Thanks for being with us today, Jeeves. How are you?

What day is it?

It’s Monday.

Monday again?

Yes, they do tend to recur. As often as once a week. What’s wrong with Mondays?

What’s Wrong with Garbage Disposals?

I don’t know. They grind things …

Back to … The Grind.

A joke. Go it. How … human.