launched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!
Ask.com has closed
31–40 of 251 posts
Re: Ask.com has closed
#32Re: Ask.com has closed
#33Re: Ask.com has closed
#34Earlier 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 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.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#35Oh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist. https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
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Re: Ask.com has closed
#36Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...
Was it ever good?
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.
as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#37Where do I buy it? Who wants to join me and buy it together?
Re: Ask.com has closed
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it ever good?
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 had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.
This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it ever good?
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.
And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it ever good?
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.
Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.