Ask.com has closed • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask.com has closed

#171

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Sat, May 02, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #156

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!

And I’ve just made the Woodhouse from Archer connection!

Archer has a whole load of obscure literary references that are easy to miss.

e.g. in the very first episode, the flight attendant's dog is named Abelard

> The name Abelard is a reference to Pierre Abélard, the French philosopher and monk, who is famous for his work in the fields of dialectic and theology, along with his tragic romance with Héloise d’Argenteuil. Additionally, Abélard was known for the studies of the Greeks, which is referenced when Abelard (the dog) "laughs" at Sterling's Greek joke.

You can find a list of cultural references here: https://archer.fandom.com/wiki/Cultural_References

Re: Ask.com has closed

#172

Post by shawryadev » Sat, May 02, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Ask.com has closed

#173

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #84

tech234a wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And now people submitting PRs :D

[deleted]

Re: Ask.com has closed

#174

Post by IshKebab » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

harikb wrote: post #55

NewJazz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.

The guy who bought friendster.com lurks here

Probably worth a fair bit more than $30k though.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#175

Post by sm0olr » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #118

Once in a while I stumple on sites like Ask.com, and I can't help wonder what it's like to work there. At some point they may have outsource almost everything, but it's hard to imagine that they don't have a few IT on staff. What does these people do? Is it like working at a dying retailer out in the sticks and it's a little confusing when a customer actually works in?

I worked for MapQuest in 2021 as an engineer. It’s pretty weird. I led a rebuild from Angular to React. Backend was all Scala. Really fun job and I worked with some excellent engineers. But the future, despite what leadership wanted us to think, was very clear in that it was a dying product with no real way back.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#176

Post by IshKebab » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

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. It never worked as advertised, was never as good as the competition and only really had any success because of the quirky theme.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#177

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:14 PM UTC

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #123

Anyone know who to contact for a possible open-sourcing of the old Teoma code? The world needs more search engines, and I vaguely remember it being reasonably good before it was bought and buried.

[deleted]