Ask Jeeves $B!G (J search technology combines natural-language processing techniques with an editorial staff to provide end-users with a focused, highly relevant search experience. After opening their first European site in March 2000, Ask Jeeves International consulted Basis Technology for help in readying their product suite for Asian markets. Since one of the explicit criteria for this development was to enable the same code base to support multiple languages, the logical choice for them was Unicode-enabled multilingual executables. Along the way the teams faced several challenges. These included processing URLs in a variety of encodings, and upgrading the existing Jeeves tokenizer to handle Unicode characters. In addition to these basic internationalization tasks, Ask Jeeves and Basis worked together to identify appropriate dictionaries, handle Japanese morphology and orthography, build a demonstrable Japanese knowledgebase, and to test this complex software. The newly established Ask Jeeves Japan KK is poised for a successful launch of the Unicode-enabled Japanese Answers software in early 2001.