Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask.com has closed

ask.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 251 posts

Re: Ask.com has closed

#71

Post by gizajob »

tptacek wrote: post #6
arm32 wrote: post #3

Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...

Was it ever good?

No not at all.

The whole point of AskJeeves was that you could ask Jeeves things in natural language because the landing page was a snappily dressed butler waiting to help you around the internet, but it didn’t really work so you were left disappointed every time. Still found myself using it because the url was easy to remember though. But then google annihilated it so nobody ever went back, and I guess why they dropped the Jeeves part of the url because he was less than useful.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#72

Post by sanswork »

For a long time ask.com had one of the only Google ad feeds allowing them to programatically request ads from Google to show on their search pages and for some reason instead of implementing it themselves they used a company I worked for to do it so for some time a lot of the ads on ask.com were actually google or yahoo ads running through a random ad server I wrote. I remember having to move our systems to make sure we were in a data centre as close as possible to them and Google/Yahoo since we had (I think?)50ms to receive a request from them, contact google and yahoo for ad inventory, merge them and return it to ask to show on the page.

(This was all like 15 years ago now)

Re: Ask.com has closed

#74

Post by tech234a »

lldb wrote: post #41

It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com

You can also see the various rejected wordings for the page in the commit history.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#75

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

bsimpson wrote: post #49
UltraSane wrote: post #10

I 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 soc…

i believe they also bought vimeo and livestream.com, and proceeded to miss the boat where Youtube took off.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#76

Post by shevy-java »

I don't think I have used ask.com in the past (perhaps many years ago though), but now I am becoming increasingly troubled here - does this mean we depend even more on google search? And it constantly gets worse too. That's concerning. We need some real alternatives that don't just suddenly vanish.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#77

Post by nomilk »

johnzim wrote: post #65
sixo wrote: post #4

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

One of the best improvements to my life was adding the following to my LLM Prompt: "Please respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories". Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.

I feel dumb but I’d not previously made the Ask Jeeves and Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse novels connection!
Post reply on HN