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Ask.com has closed

ask.com

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Re: Ask.com has closed

#131

Post by zelphirkalt »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #112

What a coincidence, I went to their website maybe 3 days ago, for the first time in maybe 15-20 years, after watching this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKWTfHNPn6k I actually felt bad for them and wondered if this type of video poking fun at them would become a trend. I can't help but think this may have influenced them to shutter to avoid more damage to the URL/brand value.

For many people ask.com will remain an annoying bloatware shit, that slipped through on the last installation of something else they installed, only causing them more work in removing it again. I don't think there was much more damage to be done. Probably, on the same level as spammers, for most people.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#132

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

This is a genius idea and I’m going to shamelessly steal it!

Thanks for sharing.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#133

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

shevy-java wrote: post #76

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.

https://kagi.com/

Re: Ask.com has closed

#134

Post by dijksterhuis »

thom wrote: post #111
sixo wrote: post #4

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

There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!

42

Re: Ask.com has closed

#136

Post by decimalenough »

rsync wrote: post #29
stingraycharles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#137

Post by kstrauser »

xnx wrote: post #110
thr0waway001 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers. I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers. I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.

Gregnant?

Pregante!

Re: Ask.com has closed

#138

Post by nephihaha »

Ask Jeeves was pretty decent when it first came out, but at some stage the answers became more and more useless. I think this is probably a combination of so much junk being online, and also some kind of censoring/modification of the results. The latter may have been well meaning, but it meant that it became unusable.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#139

Post by nephihaha »

avazhi wrote: post #62

Been using the net for 26 years and I never once used that website. Or maybe I used it once and it was so dog shit that I thought it was just a spam website. Wonder how much they’ll get for the domain name though.

It was good when it started, but it has been useless for at least ten or fifteen years now.
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