Looks like Ask Jeeves is silently improving on their search engines as well. I tried their search engine at Ask.com and tried few different queries and seems to be better results than what I was getting last time I tried. Even the features and options have improved. The related searches feature is working excellent and another feature I liked was “Email This” functionality on 'Picture Search'.Try this query to see an example.
I am sure it is still far from reaching the heights of Google, Yahoo or MSN but it is immitating most of the features of Google. My suggestions to Askjeeves guys,please work on the User Interface, it's not the best and can be optimised a lot better. Too much space is just wasted around.
Tejas Patel