Next, Yahoo Search? (It's still live.)
Ask.com has closed
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Re: Ask.com has closed
#92Missed 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.
I feel this reply deeply. Tremendously depressed right now.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#93For 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…
I'd love to see a write-up of this if you ever get the chance.
There really isn't too much more to it but happy to try and answer any specific questions. I wasn't involved in the business dealings at all so I have no clue why it happened. System was originally written in PHP and I later rewrote it in Erlang as we got more sources so I could contact all the networks for ads at the same time. It was a very lightweight system the click handler was the heavier one.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#94Earlier 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.
> 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.
Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#95Earlier 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.
It worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly
Re: Ask.com has closed
#96I 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…
Did you know Chris ("Xris") Martin? I worked with him eons ago and then I think he went to AskJeeves around 2000-ish.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#97Oh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist. https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
Nice, I guess nobody is going to bother my Ask Alko side project now.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#98Missed 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.
> the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well.
This is such a good pairing! Part of the fun of the stories is that its never clear whether Jeeves' suggestions are genuis, or overconfident but insane japes, I feel like this dynamic puts LLM hallucinations into a role where they're just part of the fun.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#99I thought I remembered using this in the 90s when it was Ask Jeeves.
Re: Ask.com has closed
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only know them as a consumer, but IAC is truly one of the most scourge-of-the-earth companies. They're retreating to publish People Magazine now, but they monopolized concert tickets as Ticketmaster, and online dating as a rollup of every mainstream app in the last 20y. They also bought CollegeHumor and drove it into the ground/irrelevance. They're a terrible company. It's no surprise that AskJeeves failed, but soc…
i believe they also bought vimeo and livestream.com, and proceeded to miss the boat where Youtube took off.
Vimeo was bought by Bending Spoons.