sure and eliza passed the turing test -- but those were all brittle in a way that LLMs are not. (they are brittle in different, more upsetting ways)

As an aside, as someone who worked on search UI for a well-known competitor, queries at the time were typically a few words at most. So the main advantage of Ask Jeeves' natural language approach was that it caused people to create longer queries, which gave their algorithm more to work with.