Ask.com has closed

Post by asciimov » Sat, May 02, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, May 02, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

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.

Post by Centigonal » Sat, May 02, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #199

boudin wrote: post #168

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 tha…

Even Oracle on windows would install an Ask toolbar in IE if you didn't untick the pre-selected checkbox in the installer. I always thought that was weird, for software that expensive to be including an IE toolbar for what, a few pennies more of revenue?

Post by macNchz » Sat, May 02, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

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…

Post by ndiddy » Sat, May 02, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

gandazgul wrote: post #189

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.