Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
Best comment I've read this week.
Ask.com has closed
221–230 of 251 posts
Re: Ask.com has closed
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 t…
I worked at GoGrid and this is one of the first times I’ve heard someone mention it who wasn’t an employee.
And yeah, the data center was fun to visit.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#223Earlier 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.
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…
You might want to search for "alexander the great" again, and also, maybe use "Alexander IV" or "Alexander of Macedon". I'm an amateur Classicist I look up ancient figures all that time, obscure and well known to check wikipedia on things, and I've never seen it prioritize that film above the figure, though perhaps it did when that movie was recent. Pity about Thor and the MCU, though.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#224I'm wondering which AI lab will bid for the domain.
The rise of LLM's had to have played a part in their demise, at least under whatever IOC is.
Could very well be that there's an AI startup aiming to use the brand to its benefit, but it's more likely the leadership teams saw massive declines in what I'm sure was an already dismal amount of traffic.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#225I unexpectedly found myself working for the UK subsidiary of AJ just before the .com bubble pop. Interesting times. Things I remember: I wrote something to do cluster analysis of the previous day’s search queries. It turned out that the most frequent search was something like “naked picture of $soapOperaShowActor”. Actual search query data might shake your ideas of the goodness of people. Much of AJ’s content was bas…
It's been a while but I also worked there at the same time. I was in the original group who set up the UK operations around the turn of the millennium.
And you recommended the Introduction to Algorithms book to me...
Re: Ask.com has closed
#226https://ask.com/ is my go-to site that I know will be up, but I know will not be in my DNS or browser cache. I use it as my "wait, is my internet really working" check. I hope the domain lives on, and that I don't want to visit it.
Yahoo.com should be your next one :)
Haha yep yahoo has been mine forever for the same reason stated by the OP
Re: Ask.com has closed
#227I was so young when I first used it and remember being delighted by the idea of phrasing a search query as a question. Google came later. Thank you for being a positive part of the web of my childhood.
Same, I started using the internet around 2007-ish and even then my sister and I were still convinced that you had to use Ask.com if you wanted to ask the internet a question. I have fond memories of that time.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#228Jeeves was just too early — natural language queries in 1997, before anyone called it conversational AI.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#229The page seems AI-generated, it has a few front-end Claudeisms:
- PlayFair Display and Inter as fonts
- Comments in the HTML for each section ("" and "")
- Bottom fade-in animation
- Tailwind (obviously a common choice for humans, but since it's an even more common choice for LLMs, it counts as evidence in favor)
Re: Ask.com has closed
#230Earlier 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.
Altavista was like the 'free' version of what some libraries had for via paid search subscriptions.
At the time where search was a tool that you had to you know.. come up with various terms (remember Google Whacks) and find results about it.
RIP Altavista