For answers, just Ask Jeeves

There's nothing like a good battle of the intellects to get the senses vibrating and that is probably how I would have felt last week when I attended the first ever fixture of the Dot Com Quiz League in London (www.dotcomquiz.co.uk), had it not been for a hellish day at work, a traipse through the Big Smoke in the pouring rain and a couple of cold beers deadening my brain.

The idea behind the new quiz league is that the might behind well-known Web sites get together for a general knowledge showdown and a jolly good social event is had by all (always an important one, that).

Round one of said quiz was a clash between the Internet butler search engine, Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) and the Web's premiere reference engine, xrefer (www.xrefer.com).

The venue was a trendy nightclub in London's Farringdon - a club so far underground that the bouncers really should have been handing out miner's hats as you entered.

The man with the questions was none other than Mr. Grumpy himself, Mark Lamarr. (A quiz 'insider' revealed to me that The Grumpy One's persona is not exclusively reserved for the stage or screen, but that's a story for another time and place.)

The atmosphere was electric as the quiz, all in aid of charity, including Lamarr's fee, began. Stakes were high, rivalry was strong and the healthily sized tab behind the bar was still going strong.

If the events of the evening had been scripted for maximum tension, the world's greatest author would have had a tough time imagining a closer match.

It was neck and neck through each round, with xrefer seeming to always have a slight points lead over their rivals, while Mark Lamarr kept us all entertained. A word of warning - don't ever attempt to heckle this man, as you will lose more surely than night follows day.

The questions were well thought-out and just tricky enough to be hard to answer on the buzzer (or B & Q electric doorbell, as was the case for each team).

Then, as often happens in quizzes, the final result hinged on the last two questions of the evening. If Ask Jeeves got the first one right, they were home and dry.

They got it right.

All that was left to do was a huge amount of cheering by the Ask Jeeves posse and a dejected looking xrefer team leader (honestly, they wuz robbed) to publicly thank Mark Lamarr before there was just time for a bit more socialising and back to Paddington for the last train home.

A great night, a great idea and a great hangover the next day.

Keep your eye on the Dot Com Quiz web site for news and results of future clashes.

**Here's a quick tip for you Mac users who sometimes find text on Web pages to be a tad small and spidery - upgrade to Internet Explorer 5 which increases screen fonts to match those of a PC making everything easier to read.

For answers, just Ask Jeeves DAVE McMANUS enjoys the celebrity launch of the first ever Dot Com Quiz League Send comments or suggestions to:

david.mcmanus@nqo.com

or visit Big Dave's web site at http://www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk/

oxfordshire/internet/big.dave.html