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.
"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…"
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…
I ended up with a host called GoGrid since they were able to offer a mix of dedicated servers and cloud for when we needed to burst and they had space in 365 Main Street SF. I went to visit their team while in town and they took me for a tour of the data centre and it was very much like that with them pointing to random racks as being owned by X, Y, and Z. It feels embarrassing to say but I was a bit star struck by the servers.
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.
I always used to think ask jeeves was a malware because of the IE bar that was installed automatically with some app (java i think).
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
Dutch here... Most of my family kept having the Yahoo search bar in there for some reason.
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.
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.
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.
It is absolutely wild and baffling to me that people don’t make connections like that, and so I wonder what kind of equally obvious (to other people) connections I haven’t made.
Archer has a whole load of obscure literary references that are easy to miss.
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.
Has anyone tried Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me these silly questions." Could be fun.
I’m building a private chatbot for myself so as not to be tripped every time Claude has an ”update”, andthis was one of the first things I implemented. With very strict system prompt of no sycophancy and calling me Sir, it works really well.
I use Marvin from the Star Force space opera book series. He loves sensors and information, and adds a level of challenge to counters the llm obsession with answering in over happy terms. I had Claude write me a character bible that I can include in projects to keep it consistent.
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.
There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!
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.
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?
I can tell you I still work there :) Its been an awesome job, startup feel but backed by a big public company. Ask.com was only a small part of the whole, we had 3000+ search brands. I worked with people who had been with Ask for 20+ years. I've been there for a decade and I'm still grieving about it shutting down.
I worked for MapQuest in 2021 as an engineer. It’s pretty weird. I led a rebuild from Angular to React. Backend was all Scala. Really fun job and I worked with some excellent engineers. But the future, despite what leadership wanted us to think, was very clear in that it was a dying product with no real way back.
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.
They optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.
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.
I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
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
Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
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.
AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
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.
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.
You hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.
Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
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.
Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.
It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.
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.
During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.
Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.
> 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.
The domain name is ripe to respawn as the name of some new AI company that no one really knows what it does and that has nothing to do with search. Agentic something something.
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.
Still feels like one big ad with an ad blocker. Not sure I’ll remember Perdu but that would be a nice fix. And maybe it connects to one domain instead of several.
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 <word>.com for each.
I did this via some sort of bash + WHOIS call in about 1995 with the dictionary file I normally used for passwd cracking. There were a lot available then.
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 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".
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.
I was in 4th grade in 2003 when I learned search engines existed (and I have a possibly tainted memory of our Computer Arts teacher in grade school explaining web crawlers and PageRank to us). We had a Gateway PC at home and AOL, but we weren't allowed to use anything networked (I only played Civ III).
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.
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.
It doesn't exist anymore, it died on one of the purges. And teoma.com had such bad bot traffic from overseas that we had to remove the DNS and abandon it it was costing more to serve the bots than the money it was making.
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.
For many people ask.com will remain an annoying bloatware shit, that slipped through on the last installation of something else they installed, only causing them more work in removing it again. I don't think there was much more damage to be done. Probably, on the same level as spammers, for most people.
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!
Via an acquisition I worked for AJ in the US for about a year before the move to the UK. It was a vivid illustration of the way in which dishonesty and backbiting could permeate an org. I knew plenty of fine individuals there, some who kindly taught me hard lessons, but as a company, a culture, it was a cesspit.
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.
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.
That stupid "Ask" toolbar that nobody in the history of computing every wanted on their computer, but millions of hapless people installed accidentally. They paid Adobe $100MM/year for a while to bundle it with Acrobat Reader. If you forgot to uncheck a little box, it would poison your browser with the Ask Toolbar.
What a disgusting company; pushing Malware onto naive users and making their web experience bad. I won't miss them.
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 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".
as I recall, they hired writers and freelancers who put together broad articles that got pointed too when you asked a question, instead of trying to answer questions individually... but my memory could be off, that was 20 years ago.
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)
"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…"
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…
I ended up with a host called GoGrid since they were able to offer a mix of dedicated servers and cloud for when we needed to burst and they had space in 365 Main Street SF. I went to visit their team while in town and they took me for a tour of the data centre and it was very much like that with them pointing to random racks as being owned by X, Y, and Z. It feels embarrassing to say but I was a bit star struck by the servers.
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.
I always used to think ask jeeves was a malware because of the IE bar that was installed automatically with some app (java i think).
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
Dutch here... Most of my family kept having the Yahoo search bar in there for some reason.
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.
Missed 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.
I feel dumb but I’d not previously made the Ask Jeeves and Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse novels connection!
And I’ve just made the Woodhouse from Archer connection!
It is absolutely wild and baffling to me that people don’t make connections like that, and so I wonder what kind of equally obvious (to other people) connections I haven’t made.
This happens to me with words I know every few years.
I think I was in my 30s when I realized rational numbers are numbers that can be expressed as a ratio. Mind blown.
Archer has a whole load of obscure literary references that are easy to miss.
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
In your defense, the Jeeves character became part of the zeitgeist on its own, as the generic perfect butler.
I knew “Jeeves” decades before I knew (and came to love) Wodehouse.
He's a valet, but if need arises, he can buttle with the best of them.
Has anyone tried Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me these silly questions." Could be fun.
I’m building a private chatbot for myself so as not to be tripped every time Claude has an ”update”, andthis was one of the first things I implemented. With very strict system prompt of no sycophancy and calling me Sir, it works really well.
I use Marvin from the Star Force space opera book series. He loves sensors and information, and adds a level of challenge to counters the llm obsession with answering in over happy terms. I had Claude write me a character bible that I can include in projects to keep it consistent.
If anyone hasn't seen the Jeeves and Wooster series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry they're missing out
Ask it for advice on learning to play the banjo...
Edit: ...or was it the ukulele?
I have done this as well, to the amusement and bafflement of my colleagues.
This is a genius idea and I’m going to shamelessly steal it!
Thanks for sharing.
I feel this reply deeply. Tremendously depressed right now.
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.
There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!
42
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
Probably worth a fair bit more than $30k though.
Yeah they could have just spun up their own version of ChatGPT/Perplexity to at least try that
I have felt the same way about defunct search engine HotBot
I'm not sure that LLM responses would be much improved by being rendered in eye-searing combinations of chartreuse and magenta...
It's a name best saved for an embodied humanobot that can do laundry, etc., too, as well as answer questions, screen calls, etc.
You have no idea how correct you are…
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!
WOW. 12 year old me would've loved this.
Two years ago I made a rudimentary chatbot/agent for our long running IRC channel using the OpenAI API as the "brain". Its nickname is Jeeves.
“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.
Obligatory Wodehouse quote
"Jeeves, of course, is a gentleman’s gentlemen, not a butler, but if the call comes, he can buttle with the best of them."
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...
Nice, I guess nobody is going to bother my Ask Alko side project now.
Did he comply? Because it seems like that site would clearly have been covered by the protection for parody.
Nicely done
It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
You can also see the various rejected wordings for the page in the commit history.
And now people submitting PRs :D
Wow thanks! I'll actually merge this lol
Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
What a great game/mod on the og hl1
Weird because after decades oddly the tech now perfectly supports their original format
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?
I can tell you I still work there :) Its been an awesome job, startup feel but backed by a big public company. Ask.com was only a small part of the whole, we had 3000+ search brands. I worked with people who had been with Ask for 20+ years. I've been there for a decade and I'm still grieving about it shutting down.
I worked for MapQuest in 2021 as an engineer. It’s pretty weird. I led a rebuild from Angular to React. Backend was all Scala. Really fun job and I worked with some excellent engineers. But the future, despite what leadership wanted us to think, was very clear in that it was a dying product with no real way back.
Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...
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 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.
They optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.
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.
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 ...
I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.
It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.
Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.
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
I think they also allowed distance between words (within x) to increase relevance.
I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].
Mee to :D
And at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.
Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
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.
originally it was directory only, wasn’t until fairly late they adddd an alta vista fallback.
AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
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've never seen this feature despite using a lot altavista back then. What a pity
Don't forget WebCrawler!
Yahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers.
I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers.
I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.
Gregnant?
Pregante!
I remember vividly how lycos was much better than google
Nobody remembers Hotbot. Google before Google.
I remember. Powered by Inktomi.
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.
You hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.
And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.
Kagi has done a good job of making it easy to cut through slop so far. I never really deal with slop search results
Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
No not at all.
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.
Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.
I very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.
It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.
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.
WAS being given
They’re done.
I think that and dogpile were the best in that short area before google took off as the clear winner.
During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.
No. It never worked as advertised, was never as good as the competition and only really had any success because of the quirky theme.
Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Between ‘97-2000, arguably.
The domain name is ripe to respawn as the name of some new AI company that no one really knows what it does and that has nothing to do with search. Agentic something something.
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?
I want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.
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.
https://perdu.com works very well for this. It also still answers to http.
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.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdu.com
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...
Yahoo.com should be your next one :)
I'd be willing to be ask.com will always resolve to a pingable IP address, that's a HOT domain name.
I've been using yahoo.com as my test domain since 1995...! I think I used microsoft.com before that, but yahoo is easier to type.
Still feels like one big ad with an ad blocker. Not sure I’ll remember Perdu but that would be a nice fix. And maybe it connects to one domain instead of several.
tl;dr ya
I use https://www.example.com. I used to use Oprah.com; for some reason, that made me laugh.
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 <word>.com for each.
It's quite rare to find an unregistered one.
I did this via some sort of bash + WHOIS call in about 1995 with the dictionary file I normally used for passwd cracking. There were a lot available then.
Aol.com for me.
At least queryquinton is still around:
https://queryquinton.com/
They don't seem to serve ads on their farewell page. Such a lost opportunity.
This is the attitude that killed the web. And kills pretty much everything it infects.
I agree, the message was a sarcasm.
No shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?
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 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".
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.
It's a very formulaic series, but it is fun. Possibly the best thing Stephen Fry ever did.
I know what a Jeeves-style character is supposed to be like, but I couldn't tell you the origin, and I'd never heard of Wooster before just now.
Open the question further, I know the time before google but know ask.com only from the infamous toolbar.
I was in 4th grade in 2003 when I learned search engines existed (and I have a possibly tainted memory of our Computer Arts teacher in grade school explaining web crawlers and PageRank to us). We had a Gateway PC at home and AOL, but we weren't allowed to use anything networked (I only played Civ III).
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.
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.
It doesn't exist anymore, it died on one of the purges. And teoma.com had such bad bot traffic from overseas that we had to remove the DNS and abandon it it was costing more to serve the bots than the money it was making.
In 6 months we’re gonna see a HN thread: “I bought ask.com for £250k - here’s what I did with it”
250k would be a steal! More like $20M+
Make an offer to IAC they might sell it.
For anyone who hasn't used ask recently, ask.com was just showing results from websites ask themselves owned.
At Chabot Science Center there is still (and, presumably, will always be) the Ask Jeeves Planetarium. Makes you think about the transiency of it all.
At least queryquinton.com is still alive.
No more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.
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
Would have been a great domain with the rise of AI, shocking they didn't adapt the persona.
Someone make a Jeeves chatbot where he opines about missing the good ol' days of assisting curious strangers on the world wide web.
Hope ask.com knowledge can be preserved in open source LLMs for future generations.
I thought I remembered using this in the 90s when it was Ask Jeeves.
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.
For many people ask.com will remain an annoying bloatware shit, that slipped through on the last installation of something else they installed, only causing them more work in removing it again. I don't think there was much more damage to be done. Probably, on the same level as spammers, for most people.
Until now I thought ask.com was only a scam site with no real existing service that users are using by choice.
Huh. https://www.askjeeves.com is that a spoof of ask.com?
I think they forgot about it
We did! it will get the holding page on Monday (:
People still use ask.com? Don’t know if I have for a long time
They don’t. Hence why it’s shutting down.
Next, Yahoo Search? (It's still live.)
I believe Yahoo now piggybacks off Bing.
Like most search engines now, it mostly returns a limited range of results from "approved" sources.
I unexpectedly found myself working for the UK subsidiary of AJ just before the .com bubble pop. Interesting times. Things I remember:
Via an acquisition I worked for AJ in the US for about a year before the move to the UK. It was a vivid illustration of the way in which dishonesty and backbiting could permeate an org. I knew plenty of fine individuals there, some who kindly taught me hard lessons, but as a company, a culture, it was a cesspit.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).
Did you know Chris ("Xris") Martin? I worked with him eons ago and then I think he went to AskJeeves around 2000-ish.
Yes I did/do. He’s a top guy. I think he did some pretty spiffy work on multiprotocol routers in the 90s.
The multiprotocol QoS routing thing was what we worked together on back in '98-ish.
Askjeeves was always kind of bad. I never used it. It still feels kind of sad its gone. Will see how ddg is going in 2035
Ironic that Ask Jeeves faked being an AI before AI completely overshadowed Ask Jeeves.
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.
https://search.brave.com
There are alternatives that dont depend on Google, like duckduckgo but the results are still not as good in more specific questions (in my experience)
https://kagi.com/
Pour one out
Can I buy the domain?
I am sad to see this
Did they get a great deal for the domain from an AI lab?
launched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!
Small language model(s).
"Jeeves’ spirit endures"
It sure does.
It’s weird to close it right as chatbots are all the rage.
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.
sad to see this
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.
That stupid "Ask" toolbar that nobody in the history of computing every wanted on their computer, but millions of hapless people installed accidentally. They paid Adobe $100MM/year for a while to bundle it with Acrobat Reader. If you forgot to uncheck a little box, it would poison your browser with the Ask Toolbar.
What a disgusting company; pushing Malware onto naive users and making their web experience bad. I won't miss them.
sad :(
truly the end of an era
I wonder what it was like working for them.
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 society is better for it.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
That was after IAC:
"Additional acquisitions in 2006 included ShoeBuy.com,[46] which the company later sold to Jet,[47] and Connected Ventures including CollegeHumor and Vimeo".
Vimeo was part of CollegeHumor.
It takes some real skill to destroy a site with as much talent as CollegeHumor had
as I recall, they hired writers and freelancers who put together broad articles that got pointed too when you asked a question, instead of trying to answer questions individually... but my memory could be off, that was 20 years ago.
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.
It was good when it started, but it has been useless for at least ten or fifteen years now.