The idea of natural-language search was early, but the brand may have made it feel less technical than it really was. https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=212
Ask.com has closed
61–70 of 251 posts
Re: Ask.com has closed
#62Been using the net for 26 years and I never once used that website. Or maybe I used it once and it was so dog shit that I thought it was just a spam website.
Wonder how much they’ll get for the domain name though.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#63https://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.
I have a tiny bash script that picks four random common words from the list of the 10000 most common words on Wikipedia and tries to ping .com for each.
It's quite rare to find an unregistered one.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#64https://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.
I use https://www.example.com. I used to use Oprah.com; for some reason, that made me laugh.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#65Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
One of the best improvements to my life was adding the following to my LLM Prompt: "Please respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories".
Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#66Earlier 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.
> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.
My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#67Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
I think about six months ago I commented on an AI thread to the effect of “I’m happy that after a 30 year effort and hundreds of billions spent, AskJeeves finally works as intended” - Jeeves is totally ripe for LLMing.
Completely baffling that after keeping ask.com going for this entire time (some two and a half decades of irrelevance) they shut it down at the point at which it can actually be made to work.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#68Earlier 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.
Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.
For all practical purposes, internet search is dead or dying. It has been enshittified to perfection by multiple parties. Those who could have been called users in a previous life are the ones getting the least use out of it. For a brief period of time, LLMs can help. Until their inevitable decay into ad-infested hellscapes makes them just as useless. They don't have ad blockers.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#69Earlier 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…
I pay for kagi on my personal machine, it is always a delight when my cmd-t search is answered kagi and not a list of ads ...
Re: Ask.com has closed
#70No more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.