Ask Jeeves

You can find it at http://www.ask.co.uk.

The idea is that you can type in questions in ordinary English. Forget Boolean operators, plus and minus signs, double quote marks. Just type in what you want to know:

Ask Jeeves responds to your question with a list of closely relevant questions to which it knows the answer. To answer some questions, Jeeves will ask you a follow-up question to help give you the best possible answer. Some questions have drop-down lists that contain related topics. Select the item you are interested in.

You will also get a list of sites that other people have found useful:

And the top ten results results from ordinary search engines:

You can also take a look at what people are asking at the moment. There’s a page with list of questions. This page is supposed to refresh every 30 seconds or so.

You can use one of the special areas (travel, money, shopping) where you look at lists of questions that Ask Jeeves can answer.