alt Hacker NewsAsk.com has closed
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People still use ask.com? Don’t know if I have for a long time
Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
“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.
Oh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
It’s weird to close it right as chatbots are all the rage.
It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
I am sad to see this
Hope ask.com knowledge can be preserved in open source LLMs for future generations.
Once in a while I stumple on sites like Ask.com, and I can't help wonder what it's like to work there.
At some point they may have outsource almost everything, but it's hard to imagine that they don't have a few IT on staff. What does these people do? Is it like working at a dying retailer out in the sticks and it's a little confusing when a customer actually works in?
Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...
sad to see this
For anyone who hasn't used ask recently, ask.com was just showing results from websites ask themselves owned.
You have a great and well known domain name, why not launch a GPT powered LLM on it?
It's a huge opportunity.
Where do I buy it? Who wants to join me and buy it together?
They don't seem to serve ads on their farewell page. Such a lost opportunity.
I want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.
sad :(
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.
Anyone know who to contact for a possible open-sourcing of the old Teoma code? The world needs more search engines, and I vaguely remember it being reasonably good before it was bought and buried.
Ask Jeeves was pretty decent when it first came out, but at some stage the answers became more and more useless. I think this is probably a combination of so much junk being online, and also some kind of censoring/modification of the results. The latter may have been well meaning, but it meant that it became unusable.
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
What a coincidence, I went to their website maybe 3 days ago, for the first time in maybe 15-20 years, after watching this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKWTfHNPn6k
I actually felt bad for them and wondered if this type of video poking fun at them would become a trend.
I can't help but think this may have influenced them to shutter to avoid more damage to the URL/brand value.
I thought I remembered using this in the 90s when it was Ask Jeeves.
No more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.
Ironic that Ask Jeeves faked being an AI before AI completely overshadowed Ask Jeeves.
Next, Yahoo Search? (It's still live.)
I 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 based on editorial staff (often young journalistic folk) researching what they thought might be the highest quality answer. One day I passed the desk of a colleague who was watching porn. What now? It turns out that they wanted to be able to answer the question “best porn of $kink” for a large variety of kinks. Which meant that they also had to have a policy of how to direct queries for CP. To something less harmful obvs.
As a corollary of the above, the editors needed a way to search for candidate results. What did they use for this? Google of course!
Anyway I got laid off in the great wave of 2001, was out of work for a while, did some truly awful work on supermarket planogram s/w and eventually got a gig doing IP routing. Ever since then I’ve been patronising grad hires by telling them how useful it is to have a bad job in your past. It makes it much easier to cope with occasional bad days at an otherwise good place. “Sure, my code crashes on a double exception when the reverse bcopy chokes on an unwired chunk of address space in the ARP lookup interrupt path, but at least I’m not trying to optimise the positioning of cornflakes to take advantage is this month’s promo pricing”. Good god, there was a time when I had a subscription to The Grocer magazine. Watch out kids. This could happen to you! (I also got to spend a day following a guy around the London Underground as he refilled chocolate vending machines. But I won’t talk more about that unless you buy me a beer).
I don't think I have used ask.com in the past (perhaps many years ago though), but now I am becoming increasingly troubled here - does this mean we depend even more on google search? And it constantly gets worse too. That's concerning. We need some real alternatives that don't just suddenly vanish.
Would have been a great domain with the rise of AI, shocking they didn't adapt the persona.
Pour one out
Can I buy the domain?
Did they get a great deal for the domain from an AI lab?
"Jeeves’ spirit endures"
It sure does.
End of an era
I was so young when I first used it and remember being delighted by the idea of phrasing a search query as a question. Google came later.
Thank you for being a positive part of the web of my childhood.
truly the end of an era
Been 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.
For 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 we were in a data centre as close as possible to them and Google/Yahoo since we had (I think?)50ms to receive a request from them, contact google and yahoo for ad inventory, merge them and return it to ask to show on the page.
(This was all like 15 years ago now)