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Ask.com has closed

ask.com

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Re: Ask.com has closed

#211

Post by Clamchop »

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?

I remember most installers bundling such bullshit. It may have been so normalized that no one was sincerely asking if participating would harm their reputation.

I barely noticed as the practice went out of fashion but I'm so glad it did.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#212

Post by Cpoll »

rpdillon wrote: post #191
dmd wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This happens to me with words I know every few years. I think I was in my 30s when I realized rational numbers are numbers that can be expressed as a ratio . Mind blown.

A ratio of integers to be pedantic.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#213

Post by fsckboy »

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.

i don't know precisely the architectures they both used (i tend not to study things that are changing and over which i have no control), but here's what I would say:

I like boolean and literalism etc., I like control and syntactic precision, and I did not prefer google when it first got traction and buzz, but within six months of that, google's "page ranked" back-end database was clearly superior to what altavista's front-end queries could do with their own back end data.

it shocked me when people I thought I knew well would say "I always hit google's "I feel lucky" to go straight to the top search result. Me, I prefer to pore through results looking for nuance and to fine tune my query. google was giving me much better results to look at, even if I had less control for fine tuning. Google has relentlessly over time diminished literalism in queries in favor of mass market popularity. As an overly simplistic example, when I look up Thor, I am never interested in any film or who was in it, and that's pretty much all you get now. Alexander the Great is an incredible figure from history, shaping the geo landscape in ways that still affect us today, but searchwise he's just a fictionalized portrayal by a celebrity who don't even have his own authenticity.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#217

Post by otterley »

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…

My company's cage was the unfortunate neighbor of Google's cage at Exodus SC3 in Santa Clara. Even then, Google's compute density was much higher than industry standards. They didn't rack-mount their servers; they basically extracted every part that wound be in a case (motherboard, PSU, disks, heat sinks, etc.) and laid it on a cork board shelf. They then placed the boards two units deep, so if you needed to service the unit in back, you'd have to remove the unit in front first. These were all wired like spaghetti to an HP switch sitting on top of the cabinet. It looked like a meth head's house. Here's a photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#/media/Fil...

Anyway, the heat emanating from their space was absolutely insane. Our servers would have random thermal shutdowns because their excess heat was penetrating our space, and this impacted our overall ability both to serve and to get some sleep as we were paged 24x7.

This was before modern cold/hot aisle DC designs, so the only thing that could be done was for the colo facility to add more air conditioning. They set up some spot coolers that helped, but we moved to a different facility about as fast we could.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#218

Post by ticulatedspline »

vincefutr23 wrote: post #192

Weird because after decades oddly the tech now perfectly supports their original format

Same thought, feels like turning around just before you reach the destination.

ask.com and Jeeves were established brands perfectly poised to dive head first into LLM land.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#219

Post by toraway »

IshKebab wrote: post #176
tptacek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when being taught how to use the internet in schools was still a thing, I would see vestigial references to Ask Jeeves included as an alternative to Google that “let you use natural sentences”. With a 0% success rate every time I tried.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#220

Post by 1313ed01 »

mrandish wrote: post #60
rsync wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just de…

Google did for a long time have a page documenting those features.

Picked a random date from around the time I know they had that. Clicked Adcanced Search, then a link near the top of the page to Advanced Search Tips.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google...

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