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Ask.com has closed

ask.com

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Re: Ask.com has closed

#21

Post by arm32 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #19
fudgeonastick wrote: post #17

https://ask.com/ is my go-to site that I know will be up, but I know will not be in my DNS or browser cache. I use it as my "wait, is my internet really working" check. I hope the domain lives on, and that I don't want to visit it.

Yahoo.com should be your next one :)

I'd be willing to be ask.com will always resolve to a pingable IP address, that's a HOT domain name.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#22

Post by kwoff »

stingraycharles wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it ever good?

None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons. Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

Re: Ask.com has closed

#23

Post by NewJazz »

sixo wrote: post #4

Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.

Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#25

Post by tptacek »

stingraycharles wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it ever good?

None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons. Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#26

Post by pailingems »

sixo wrote: post #4

Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.

Two years ago I made a rudimentary chatbot/agent for our long running IRC channel using the OpenAI API as the "brain". Its nickname is Jeeves.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#28

Post by helterskelter »

stingraycharles wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it ever good?

None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons. Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#29

Post by rsync »

stingraycharles wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it ever good?

None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons. Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.

Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.

None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

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