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Ask.com has closed

ask.com

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Re: Ask.com has closed

#181

Post by alex1138 »

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.

If anyone hasn't seen the Jeeves and Wooster series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry they're missing out

Re: Ask.com has closed

#183

Post by bsimpson »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #75
bsimpson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vimeo was part of CollegeHumor.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#184

Post by fortran77 »

That stupid "Ask" toolbar that nobody in the history of computing every wanted on their computer, but millions of hapless people installed accidentally. They paid Adobe $100MM/year for a while to bundle it with Acrobat Reader. If you forgot to uncheck a little box, it would poison your browser with the Ask Toolbar.

What a disgusting company; pushing Malware onto naive users and making their web experience bad. I won't miss them.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#186

Post by roryirvine »

rickcarlino wrote: post #159
sixo wrote: post #4

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

I have felt the same way about defunct search engine HotBot

I'm not sure that LLM responses would be much improved by being rendered in eye-searing combinations of chartreuse and magenta...

Re: Ask.com has closed

#188

Post by pmdr »

The domain name is ripe to respawn as the name of some new AI company that no one really knows what it does and that has nothing to do with search. Agentic something something.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#189

Post by gandazgul »

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 can tell you I still work there :) Its been an awesome job, startup feel but backed by a big public company. Ask.com was only a small part of the whole, we had 3000+ search brands. I worked with people who had been with Ask for 20+ years. I've been there for a decade and I'm still grieving about it shutting down.
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