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

161–170 of 251 posts

Re: Ask.com has closed

#161

Post by luotuoshangdui »

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.

Has anyone tried Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me these silly questions." Could be fun.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#162

Post by james_marks »

nomilk wrote: post #77
johnzim wrote: post #65

Earlier 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!

In your defense, the Jeeves character became part of the zeitgeist on its own, as the generic perfect butler.

I knew “Jeeves” decades before I knew (and came to love) Wodehouse.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#163

Post by krater23 »

bsder wrote: post #38
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 had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update. For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones. This is a…

I've never seen this feature despite using a lot altavista back then. What a pity

Re: Ask.com has closed

#166

Post by krater23 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #131
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.

Until now I thought ask.com was only a scam site with no real existing service that users are using by choice.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#167

Post by sanswork »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #155
sanswork wrote: post #72

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…

"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…

I ended up with a host called GoGrid since they were able to offer a mix of dedicated servers and cloud for when we needed to burst and they had space in 365 Main Street SF. I went to visit their team while in town and they took me for a tour of the data centre and it was very much like that with them pointing to random racks as being owned by X, Y, and Z. It feels embarrassing to say but I was a bit star struck by the servers.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#168

Post by boudin »

I always used to think ask jeeves was a malware because of the IE bar that was installed automatically with some app (java i think).

A fair amount of my teenage years was spent on uninstalling IE search bars (and other crap) from the computers of friends of my parents and ask jeeves was a massive pain to remove (had to remove dlls and registry entries manually as the uninstaller wasn't doing anything).

Because of that i wonder if most people outside of english speaking countries ignored there was a legit service behind this malware. I, for sure, never used it and always told people to not touch it based on how dodgy this search bar was.

So, because the time i wasted because of you and the number of computers you messed up by showing up uninvited, i say good ridance jeeves, i never liked you

Re: Ask.com has closed

#169

Post by raptor99 »

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://search.brave.com

Re: Ask.com has closed

#170

Post by orthoxerox »

james_marks wrote: post #162
nomilk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In your defense, the Jeeves character became part of the zeitgeist on its own, as the generic perfect butler. I knew “Jeeves” decades before I knew (and came to love) Wodehouse.

He's a valet, but if need arises, he can buttle with the best of them.
Post reply on HN