Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
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Ask.com has closed
231–240 of 251 posts
Re: Ask.com has closed
#232Re: Ask.com has closed
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dutch here... Most of my family kept having the Yahoo search bar in there for some reason. Then it become Google, then something else that popped up. The amount of time I've spent in my life fixing stuff on Microsoft "All binaries have full disk access by default" Windows is weird. It also mostly faded when people moved to locked-down smartphones. I wonder if young people today could even comprehend what a dangerous…
Any Windows release that was based on NT had the notion of users and administrators. It was just that in the default setup, the user account was also an administrator.
Since Vista they added a prompt, the UAC. But since they required it for almost anything people trained themselves to just hit Yes on everything.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#234For 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…
They were arbing keywords through this: they'd place ads directly on Google for low-cost keywords, which would link to an ask.com search results page that itself would display Google ads through that partnership, but with a UI designed (more than Google itself) to trick people into clicking them. Seemingly they were able to find combinations that made this profitable. The "Search Partner network" in general is one of…
>one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers
The average advertiser has no clue about this. Google's role in the advertising ecosystem has been as a scammer and monopolist for many years now. Unfortunately, every major ad network learned from them, and they all have a similar trick default setting.
The latest scam from Google is PMAX, where you YOLO your placements/ad creative/landing page combos to Google and they optimize it automatically. This serves as an optimal mechanism to funnel your ads to the most fraudulent publishers, who's army of employees fills out your forms and bypasses bot protections most effectively. Google's team will then helpfully recommend to "ummm... maybe block their IPs?". Absolute racket.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#235Earlier 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 would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
I used to read through search engine patents back in 2006-7 when I was an SEO consultant. I could see the same names from the AltaVista patents later start appearing as authors on the Google patents.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#236Askjeeves was always kind of bad. I never used it. It still feels kind of sad its gone. Will see how ddg is going in 2035
It was pretty revolutionary when it started. The results definitely declined over time.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.
originally it was directory only, wasn’t until fairly late they adddd an alta vista fallback.
If you define the mid 90s as “late,” sure. I’d argue the very phrase “Alta vista fallback” kind of screams “early,” at least in overall internet time.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#238sad to see this again
Re: Ask.com has closed
#239Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
It might be more correct to name the LLM Ask Gussie Fink-Nottle. "Oh, dash it! I didn't mean to delete your project, I've been in such a dreadful funk today. So sorry."
I'm loving the Wodehouse references in this thread.
In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!
Re: Ask.com has closed
#240It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
You can also see the various rejected wordings for the page in the commit history.
All the history is now gone and replaced with a single "Initial commit"
You can see view the history they've erased at and going back from https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/94cf10aa0152...
Including this interesting removed quote:
Search hasn’t been a strategic focus for IAC for some time and as user behavior shifted and the search landscape has become more complex, our search businesses have faced increasing challenges.
https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90dcae02ade5...