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Ask.com has closed

ask.com

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Re: Ask.com has closed

#51
post #6

Earlier 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.

Don't forget WebCrawler!

Re: Ask.com has closed

#52

https://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.

Mine is https://www.red.com/

Been using that for so many years now, probably 20ish? Oh wow, yup, I remember this page from 2006:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060505141837/http://www.red.co...

Re: Ask.com has closed

#54
post #6

Earlier 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 and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#55
post #23
post #4

Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.

Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.

The guy who bought friendster.com lurks here

Re: Ask.com has closed

#56
post #45
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what is the recognition of Jeeves/Wooster among the millennials?

As a millennial, the TV show with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was played when I was a kid, and I've rewatched it several times as an adult and read a few of the books. Our kids have watched the show with us too. I'm currently trying to learn the theme on the piano. I'm sure it'll continue in some niche, much like Agatha Christie, where I've seen some recent youtube vids by younger people discovering how well they're…

There are a few YouTube "can I solve [story] before the reveal?" style videos focusing on Agatha Christie novels ranging from around 4 years old to today.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#58
“Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

This goes hard.

While he never married or had children, Jeeves is survived by his brother software butlers Jenkins and Alfred who have asked the public for privacy during this difficult time.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#59
post #54

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 and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.

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.

Re: Ask.com has closed

#60
post #29

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.

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 deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.

I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.

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