Ask.com has closed
ask.com
ask.com
(This was all like 15 years ago now)
Hurricane Electric comes to mind. A friend rents rack space there and I tagged along a few times when he was installing a new server, etc. Wild place. A bit of security to even get in. In one of the huge rooms where his rented rack is, 5 meters or so of racks with the same noisy hardware—"Might be Pinterest", my friend suggested.
Other racks literally enclosed within a welded wire cage…
And yeah, the data center was fun to visit.
Anyway, the heat emanating from their space was absolutely insane. Our servers would have random thermal shutdowns because their excess heat was penetrating our space, and this impacted our overall ability both to serve and to get some sleep as we were paged 24x7.
This was before modern cold/hot aisle DC designs, so the only thing that could be done was for the colo facility to add more air conditioning. They set up some spot coolers that helped, but we moved to a different facility about as fast we could.
The "Search Partner network" in general is one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers: unless you turn it off, you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users on sketchy results pages that you have no real insight into, not just the Google results page itself. The traffic from them is garbage.
Knowing some scammy advertisers, I think that many are happy to pay to show their ads only to confused users
The average advertiser has no clue about this. Google's role in the advertising ecosystem has been as a scammer and monopolist for many years now. Unfortunately, every major ad network learned from them, and they all have a similar trick default setting.
The latest scam from Google is PMAX, where you YOLO your placements/ad creative/landing page combos to Google and they optimize it automatically. This serves as an optimal mechanism to funnel your ads to the most fraudulent publishers, who's army of employees fills out your forms and bypasses bot protections most effectively. Google's team will then helpfully recommend to "ummm... maybe block their IPs?". Absolute racket.
Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 as a natural language query model!
and until about 2000…some people preferred it!
Edit: and after that its indexing and results were clowned ruthlessly,
but that doesn’t change what I’m saying!
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 think I was in my 30s when I realized rational numbers are numbers that can be expressed as a ratio. Mind blown.
e.g. in the very first episode, the flight attendant's dog is named Abelard
> The name Abelard is a reference to Pierre Abélard, the French philosopher and monk, who is famous for his work in the fields of dialectic and theology, along with his tragic romance with Héloise d’Argenteuil. Additionally, Abélard was known for the studies of the Greeks, which is referenced when Abelard (the dog) "laughs" at Sterling's Greek joke.
You can find a list of cultural references here: https://archer.fandom.com/wiki/Cultural_References
The episode title itself is also a literary reference. I’m sure there are many cultural references that went over my head while watching the show; I really should watch it again.
I knew “Jeeves” decades before I knew (and came to love) Wodehouse.
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.
Thanks for sharing.
Edit: ...or was it the ukulele?
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.
You’re absolutely right: toss up an AI chat with some ads in a sidebar using an open source model and call it a day.
"Oh, dash it! I didn't mean to delete your project, I've been in such a dreadful funk today. So sorry."
In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!
A fair amount of my teenage years was spent on uninstalling IE search bars (and other crap) from the computers of friends of my parents and ask jeeves was a massive pain to remove (had to remove dlls and registry entries manually as the uninstaller wasn't doing anything).
Because of that i wonder if most people outside of english speaking countries ignored there was a legit service behind this malware. I, for sure, never used it and always told people to not touch it based on how dodgy this search bar was.
So, because the time i wasted because of you and the number of computers you messed up by showing up uninvited, i say good ridance jeeves, i never liked you
Then it become Google, then something else that popped up.
The amount of time I've spent in my life fixing stuff on Microsoft "All binaries have full disk access by default" Windows is weird. It also mostly faded when people moved to locked-down smartphones.
I wonder if young people today could even comprehend what a dangerous shitshow Windows was pre 7.
I barely noticed as the practice went out of fashion but I'm so glad it did.
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.
"Jeeves, of course, is a gentleman’s gentlemen, not a butler, but if the call comes, he can buttle with the best of them."
https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
You can see view the history they've erased at and going back from https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/94cf10aa0152...
Including this interesting removed quote:
Search hasn’t been a strategic focus for IAC for some time and as user behavior shifted and the search landscape has become more complex, our search businesses have faced increasing challenges.
https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90dcae02ade5...
> Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.
> Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.
Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.
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 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.
Picked a random date from around the time I know they had that. Clicked Adcanced Search, then a link near the top of the page to Advanced Search Tips.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google...
My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.
I like boolean and literalism etc., I like control and syntactic precision, and I did not prefer google when it first got traction and buzz, but within six months of that, google's "page ranked" back-end database was clearly superior to what altavista's front-end queries could do with their own back end data.
it shocked me when people I thought I knew well would say "I always hit google's "I feel lucky" to go straight to the top search result. Me, I prefer to pore through results looking for nuance and to fine tune my query. google was giving me much better results to look at, even if I had less control for fine tuning. Google has relentlessly over time diminished literalism in queries in favor of mass market popularity. As an overly simplistic example, when I look up Thor, I am never interested in any film or who was in it, and that's pretty much all you get now. Alexander the Great is an incredible figure from history, shaping the geo landscape in ways that still affect us today, but searchwise he's just a fictionalized portrayal by a celebrity who don't even have his own authenticity.
At the time where search was a tool that you had to you know.. come up with various terms (remember Google Whacks) and find results about it.
RIP Altavista
Google took a different approach to web search
For me AltaVista was superior. It seemed that people who were not particularky good at searching prefered Google
Perhaps this explains its popularity
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.
I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers.
I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.
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.
They’re done.
The whole point of AskJeeves was that you could ask Jeeves things in natural language because the landing page was a snappily dressed butler waiting to help you around the internet, but it didn’t really work so you were left disappointed every time. Still found myself using it because the url was easy to remember though. But then google annihilated it so nobody ever went back, and I guess why they dropped the Jeeves part of the url because he was less than useful.
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?
I hope the domain lives on, and that I don't want to visit it.
tl;dr ya
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...
It's quite rare to find an unregistered one.
Apparently it'll turn 30 years old in a few weeks [1]. It hasn't changed much if at all since its inception.
Its very small size makes it perfect for curl perdu.com or when the connection is very bad.
It's a huge opportunity.
- PlayFair Display and Inter as fonts
- Comments in the HTML for each section ("<!-- Main Content -->" and "<!-- The Logo -->")
- Bottom fade-in animation
- Tailwind (obviously a common choice for humans, but since it's an even more common choice for LLMs, it counts as evidence in favor)
ask.com and Jeeves were established brands perfectly poised to dive head first into LLM land.
But we were essentially taught to use multiple search engines, but that was AskJeeves, Yahoo!, and Google. We liked AskJeeves because of the whimsy. Yahoo! felt too adult and Google felt too much like adults pretending to be kids.
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 written. I like it when they say "follows the old trope of ..." and then in the comments you get "doesn't follow it, invented it".
Could very well be that there's an AI startup aiming to use the brand to its benefit, but it's more likely the leadership teams saw massive declines in what I'm sure was an already dismal amount of traffic.
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).
And you recommended the Introduction to Algorithms book to me...
Thank you for being a positive part of the web of my childhood.
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.
They're a terrible company. It's no surprise that AskJeeves failed, but society is better for it.
"Additional acquisitions in 2006 included ShoeBuy.com,[46] which the company later sold to Jet,[47] and Connected Ventures including CollegeHumor and Vimeo".
It sure does.
What a disgusting company; pushing Malware onto naive users and making their web experience bad. I won't miss them.
Wonder how much they’ll get for the domain name though.