It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
Ask.com has closed
41–50 of 251 posts
Re: Ask.com has closed
#42Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#43No shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?
Yeah, what is the recognition of Jeeves/Wooster among the millennials?
I was in 4th grade in 2003 when I learned search engines existed (and I have a possibly tainted memory of our Computer Arts teacher in grade school explaining web crawlers and PageRank to us). We had a Gateway PC at home and AOL, but we weren't allowed to use anything networked (I only played Civ III).
But we were essentially taught to use multiple search engines, but that was AskJeeves, Yahoo!, and Google. We liked AskJeeves because of the whimsy. Yahoo! felt too adult and Google felt too much like adults pretending to be kids.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#44I wonder what it was like working for them.
as I recall, they hired writers and freelancers who put together broad articles that got pointed too when you asked a question, instead of trying to answer questions individually... but my memory could be off, that was 20 years ago.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#45No shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?
Yeah, what is the recognition of Jeeves/Wooster among the millennials?
As a millennial, the TV show with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was played when I was a kid, and I've rewatched it several times as an adult and read a few of the books. Our kids have watched the show with us too. I'm currently trying to learn the theme on the piano.
I'm sure it'll continue in some niche, much like Agatha Christie, where I've seen some recent youtube vids by younger people discovering how well they're written. I like it when they say "follows the old trope of ..." and then in the comments you get "doesn't follow it, invented it".
Re: Ask.com has closed
#46https://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.
Aol.com for me.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#47Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
You have no idea how correct you are…
Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 as a natural language query model!
and until about 2000…some people preferred it!
Edit: and after that its indexing and results were clowned ruthlessly,
but that doesn’t change what I’m saying!
Re: Ask.com has closed
#48Re: Ask.com has closed
#49I wonder what it was like working for them.
I only know them as a consumer, but IAC is truly one of the most scourge-of-the-earth companies. They're retreating to publish People Magazine now, but they monopolized concert tickets as Ticketmaster, and online dating as a rollup of every mainstream app in the last 20y. They also bought CollegeHumor and drove it into the ground/irrelevance.
They're a terrible company. It's no surprise that AskJeeves failed, but society is better for it.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it ever good?
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions. as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.
WAS being given
They’re done.