Oh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist. https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
Did he comply? Because it seems like that site would clearly have been covered by the protection for parody.
Ask.com has closed
151–160 of 251 posts
Re: Ask.com has closed
#152Earlier 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.
I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#153People still use ask.com? Don’t know if I have for a long time
They don’t. Hence why it’s shutting down.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google. My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.
Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.
They optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#155For 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…
"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…"
Hurricane Electric comes to mind. A friend rents rack space there and I tagged along a few times when he was installing a new server, etc. Wild place. A bit of security to even get in. In one of the huge rooms where his rented rack is, 5 meters or so of racks with the same noisy hardware—"Might be Pinterest", my friend suggested.
Other racks literally enclosed within a welded wire cage…
Re: Ask.com has closed
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
And I’ve just made the Woodhouse from Archer connection!
Re: Ask.com has closed
#157Missed 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.
Ask it for advice on learning to play the banjo...
Edit: ...or was it the ukulele?
Re: Ask.com has closed
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel dumb but I’d not previously made the Ask Jeeves and Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse novels connection!
And I’ve just made the Woodhouse from Archer connection!
It is absolutely wild and baffling to me that people don’t make connections like that, and so I wonder what kind of equally obvious (to other people) connections I haven’t made.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#159Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
I have felt the same way about defunct search engine HotBot
Re: Ask.com has closed
#160Earlier 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.
I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].
Mee to :D