8 ms·

The Vindication of Ask Jeeves

87 points by marban 4y ago

neonate 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230307213007/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ask-jeeves-chatgpt-bing-ai-chatbot-google-search/673275/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230307213007/https://www.theatl... https://archive.ph/xlOM3 https://archive.ph/xlOM3
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
I just want an effective boolean search. I don't want it automatically fixing type-os or including synonyms in results. If I remember a specific phrase, or misspelling from some random blog, I want to type that in and find it. Google search has gotten significantly worse since they started trying to be a generalized question/answer tool. Of course it doesn't help that most of the internet is walled off now. I suspect that AI search will be very useful for looking up information, but awful for searching webpages.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Google search can’t do what you want because there’s just too much noise in the “crawl everything” internet and the noise grows exponentially faster than the techniques that can automatically organize and rank it. There was a period of time where the ratio between indexing techniques and content worked, but we’re leaving that era now. All those things you hate about modern Google are necessary survival strategies for this model. AI search can’t solve that problem. What it can do is give up on the idea of surfacing specific sources in favor of synthesizing answers from slurry of all the content, finding (or hallucinating) signal in the noise. If you want strict keywords and boolean operators, you can’t expect to find that from the universal search engines that you’re used to. You want to look for and support curated engines that aggressively restrict what they index so that it contains high signal and low noise. Internal walled garden searches do this. Marginalia does this. Others probably do too. That’s what you’re looking for.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > All those things you hate about modern Google are necessary survival strategies for this model. The reason I doubt this is because right now, I can find what I'm looking for through keyword searches on search engines that allow that, where I very often can't through the likes of Google.
    - lll-o-lll 4y ago
      What search engines allow this?
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Very few, but the closest approximation that I can find right now is DDG. Kagi might fulfill this role better. I haven't investigated it yet, though.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Supposedly. The trouble is there's no way for me to know how true this noise theory is. I'm given no option by these search engines to "just show me all the crap." What search engines do today is so filtered and heuristical that there are apparently phrases and ideas that have never been expressed on the internet ever, or at least that's the impression I'd get if I was more naive. Besides, it's not like there isn't noise anyway. Ever click on the top results only to find that nothing matches your query and probably never did?
    - allturtles 4y ago
      Do you really expect them to maintain an entire other version of the search product just to prove to skeptics that that version is not good?
      - ravenstine 4y ago
        No.
    - 4y ago
- substation13 4y ago
  Sometimes I want a simpler system so that I can understand how it works in order to make it do exactly what I want. This is like driving your own car. Other times, I want an intelligent system that figures out what I really meant and take care of the details. This is like having a chauffeur. Which is better? It depends. But Google seems to think that only chauffeur style is important.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Much as I'm a bit of a sceptic, this is actually quite a compelling aspect of ChatGPT isn't it? It's not even the LLM necessarily, it's the interaction and the NLP: 'those results are not what I'm looking for [remove all those], I remember something I saw before [if you have access to my history..] which included the phrase 'hunter2' [refine for exactly that, not hunter without number, not different numbers, not synonyms for hunter]'
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      When I'm looking for web pages, though, I actively don't want to use natural language. Natural language is too vague and open to interpretation. To make it work, you have to get very precise in your wording, and it's just easier to get the right precision using keywords and operators.
      - _puk 4y ago
        Why does it have to be so binary? Natural Language is great for loosely defining what you want, whilst literal searches are great for finding the exact occurrence of something you know you are looking for. I can imagine something like: Search for the error code: "XY123", triggered by product "ABC" when I try and start it bound to port 123. I'm using version 1.0.0, and want results from the official documentation or sites of good repute. Only include solved problems, and give me references in your results. Granted, a lot of that could be covered by special incantations in a more literal search, but that just feels far more flexible. Note I'm trying to delineate between literal (in quotes) and Natural Language in this example if it's not clear.
- KMag 4y ago
  Early Google was somewhat intentionally optimized for long-tail searches, the thought being that common searches are served fine by most search engines and it's the difficult long-tail searches where people actually try other search engines and cause people to switch their defaults/habits. I suspect it's very difficult to properly define a machine learning objective to specifically optimize for the long-tail. Without very careful crafting, I suspect learn-to-rank optimizes more evenly, resulting in poorer ranking performance in the difficult long-tail. Back 20 years ago when I worked on web search infra at Google, a bunch of the "do what I mean, not what I say" features were disabled if you used any of the search operators in your query. If I recall correctly, it even used its "Kansas" database of per-user data to check if you'd recently used any search operators. Most of that would be very difficult and/or costly to implement with learn-to-rank, though, I guess you could pass a "power_user" boolean to learn-to-rank to try and regain some of the lost functionality.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Are you sure? From the original Google paper: In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). [0] [0]http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
    - KMag 4y ago
      Circa 2003, Yahoo wasn't terrible. By our internal metrics, Yahoo search had better results than Bing before Yahoo started using Bing as their back-end. By that point, I suspect all of the major search engines were using some form of link-graph based ranking signals, likely modified both for scalability and avoiding the PageRank patent. Maybe I was a bit loose with my definition of "Early Google", but in the 2003-2010 time frame, the major search engines had pretty well figured out the most common 95% to 99% of queries.
- jimhefferon 4y ago
  Most of the time when I have a tool that tries to guess what I want, I hate it. I hate it with a deep and burning hatred. I call it the "Clippy" effect.
  - cubefox 4y ago
    We a right at the point in history were this is about to change. I tried "new Bing" and it understands better than ChatGPT while also being able to use online search. And Google's Bard is just a few months, or weeks, away. Just a few years ago (pre GPT-3) this would have been unthinkable.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    Suggestions/autocomplete are force multipliers that can also go <1. When they are accurate, they save you a lot of typing/work. When they are inaccurate, you waste time processing the noise and have to do the work anyways.
    - munk-a 4y ago
      Here's the problem (and why I personally hate overly smart IDEs) - my job is a creative one where most of the time I'm thinking and want my hands to be on autopilot. Writing out a skeleton class definition is something I can do blindfolded it takes almost no effort - an autocompleter getting that skeleton wrong (or writing a skeleton for a class with no interfaces and requiring me to backtrack through its garbled crap) takes effort. Reacting to things (observing the world and acting in response) will always take more mental effort than mindlessly slamming out some rote BS. IDEs optimize a part of my job that I honestly could care less about (writing massive amounts of green field code) at the expense of making occasional mistakes when I'm doing my actual job (examining and tweaking existing code). This trade off is not worth it. I'll uh - I'll keep function autocompletion though. Trying to remember whether my coworker called it `getWidget()` or `WidgetRegistry::get()` is something I don't need to waste brain cells on.
      - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
        The history of useless code-automation tools is long. Back in the day, it was generating boilerplate API code for Windows etc. Write an app in a day! But the lie was, in an app development schedule of 2000 hours, the tool made the 6-hour window definition effort into a 1-hour effort. So what? It was good for demo-ware showing what an app might look like. But pointless for real work. Popular among the vaporware crowd, marketing and pitching etc. But not for software engineers.
- xnx 4y ago
  Is quoting terms not working for you? I don't think I've had problems with any specific searches when I explicitly quote my terms. e.g. "this is exactly the phrase I want to search" or "search" "these" "words"
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Google's quoting has never worked well for me since they made the shift away from keyword searching. Oddly, before they made that shift, it did work.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    You also have to go into the "Tools" menu at the top of the results and change "All results" to "Verbatim", otherwise it'll probably include conjugations even with the quotes.
    - deleted 4y ago
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Fixing typos in "search" illustrates the difference between "search" as a means to find out whether something exists in a database versus a means for an advertising company to direct the searcher to the most optimum page for supporting advertising services.1 What is the difference between showing someone the winning advertisement versus showing them the winning "search result".1 The advertising company makes a decision according to secret criteria which ad/search result to show. A long, successful tradition of using alphabetical or chronological sorting for information, objective criteria, is jettisoned in favour of manipulation for commercial benefit of a middleman. The advertising company gets to decide what comes first and last, according to subjective criteria. Then make it infeasible to see what is last. Google has admitted that in the majority of cases, an appropriate ad does not exist to pair with a given search query. That is what I call the noncommercial web. It has little direct value to "tech" companies and advertisers. Yet "tech" company intermediaries want to surveil and control our access to it nonetheless. As the parent states, "most of the internet is walled off." In sum, the advertising company, and "AI", allow people to search for web content that exists, cf. allowing people to search for whether certain web content exists. The advertising company will make "suggestions". However not all content that exists is made searchable by the advertising company. If the content has no commercial value, e.g., it is "unpopular", it is considered garbage.3 1. When we search Wikipedia, typos do not result in "guessing" by an advertising company. If something does not exist, Wikipedia does not try to guess "what we want". 2. The term "winning" applies because the advertising company makes the process an actual auction or an effective contest. 3. If the web is mostly garbage, then its users should be entitled to know that through discovery. It seems as if the discoverable web, the one optimised for the advertising company, is mostly commercial garbage anyway. It is difficult to be serious about "AI" when it is trained on mostly garbage.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - klooney 4y ago
    I'm really on the fence about Kagi. Results are good, but I'm just so accustomed to search being free.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > fixing type-os I see what you did there ("typos"). Your reasons for search usefulness declining somehow ignore the elephant in the room: SEO. Because search as a business tends to be about advertising monetization, that's the system that gets gamed. Want better search? Or at least a differently-skewed search? Find a way to make it not be about ad money.
- cpeterso 4y ago
  Google PageRank was a breakthrough, but IIRC, another huge search improvement was Google AND'ing search terms instead of OR'ing them: if you searched for apple pie, AltaVista would return a list of pages that include apple OR pie (perhaps a lot of useless hits about Apple Computer and cherry pies), while would Google return only pages with apple AND pie.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dangus 4y ago
  Most likely, this is what you think you want. If Google actually gave you this you'd probably be wondering why your results were so irrelevant. It's similar to how music players don't use true random algorithms for shuffling music. The truth is that what people want from "random" is "I am not so likely to hear the same song too quickly" not "true random," which would have the possibility of playing the same song twice in a row. By the way, in Google you can put exact queries in quotes, and there's also advanced search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
shiftoutbox 4y ago
Uhh we are talking about ask.com / iac and the same idiots who made the ask tollbar; Hey they also claimed they did yoga in their data center too . Let’s talk about that
- spicybright 4y ago
  That doesn't have much to do with the subject of the article. Why stay salty about a tool bar and yoga 20+ years later?
JohnFen 4y ago
An "answer machine" such as Ask Jeeves is a fantastic and desirable tool. So is a search engine. I think a lot of people (with Google's encouragement) don't see them as two different sorts of tasks, but they are. In an ideal world, we'd have both. If Google (or whoever) wants to be an answer machine, that's cool. My fear is that it will be done instead of, rather than along with, a search engine.
deleted 4y ago
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DeathArrow 4y ago
I used Altavista and Yahoo in that time.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  As I recall, Altavista and Lycos tended to prove the most useful for me in the pre-Google era. Yahoo was hit or miss and Excite was middling. I’d bet that the things being searched for influenced which engines were best for a given individual. It’s too bad there’s no way to see what each excelled at.
  - askvictor 4y ago
    I recall yahoo being good as a structured directory (i.e. browse by categories), and altavista for search.
    - geenew 4y ago
      Yahoo's directory was created by humans, too, afair, which might be one solution to the current problem. It costs a lot to create and maintain, but in a sea of gamed websites, it might be a viable solution to the problem of finding genuinely good information.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    I searched for porn, programming, computer science and anything computer related in that order.
spicybright 4y ago
A side tangent, it would be really cool if they brought the Jeeves character back somehow. I always loved that goofy yet classy little dude.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Maybe someone can bring him back with a pre-prompted ChatGPT. me> For the remainder of this conversation, pretend to be the butler named Jeeves from Ask Jeeves. cgpt> Very well, sir/madam. As you wish, I shall assume the persona of Jeeves from Ask Jeeves for the remainder of our conversation. How may I assist you today? me> What is the capital of Assyria? cgpt> I apologize, sir/madam, but Assyria is an ancient civilization that existed in the Mesopotamian region of the world, and it does not have a modern-day capital. The ancient city of Assur was the original capital of Assyria, but it has long since ceased to exist as a functioning city. If you have any further questions about ancient civilizations, I would be happy to assist you to the best of my ability.
jszymborski 4y ago
Anyone able to speculate on who the "unnamed third-party" Ask outsourced their search to in 2010?
- deleted 4y ago
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petercooper 4y ago
A few years ago I was looking up US trademarks and randomly tried Ask Jeeves and noticed all the registrations were dead. I've just looked again and some random guy in Seattle has a registration going through for it as we speak.. so maybe Jeeves will return in some form or another.
iafiaf 4y ago
HotBot represent!
deleted 4y ago
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harry8 4y ago
Search appears to be dead. Recent example. I've got a pine64 a64 board with an ES9023 audio "POT" daughter board that runs and boots linux using armbian fine. Doesn't know about the ES9023 audio DAC, spdif and i2s(?) rca output. Ok so first thing I think of is, what kernel module is the driver for it so I know if it is even available or do I need to compile a kernel. Sure pine64 documentation is woeful unless you want to read schematics or something so it could have been there, but it isn't. This should not be a hard question to answer with a search engine. pine64 a64 audio es9023 linux kernel driver Try it. Watch google do the wrong thing no matter what you do. Quote. allintext: you name it. It's nuts. Google wants to show you what it wants, not what you want. That appears to be what it is. You want to find something, get stuffed. Google is no use to find things. Google is good to show you things it chooses in the general area of your interest. Ok but that is not a "search" engine. It's a recommendation system, fine if that is what you want but a flipping diaster of orwellian proportions if that recommendation engine is the best we have for search and we haven't noted it and responded. I'm more likely to get the answer faster posting about how garbage google search his than repeatedly trying different google "tricks" just crazy. So yeah the answer I really want is what else can we use that actually does search?
- Nition 4y ago
  What's the ideal result you'd want for that search? This is what I get: https://i.imgur.com/t0roTR2.png https://i.imgur.com/t0roTR2.png
  - harry8 4y ago
    So the question I want to answer is "What is the name of the kernel module that drives the es9023 daughter board on the pine64 a64" Which of those results are you recommending as the answer? edit: completely and totally prepared to accept I'm being a moron. The name of the driver, the link where you got it and how you got the link from google and I will decry it loudly here.
    - chiph 4y ago
      I gave ChatGPT a try - it just tells you to use lsmod and modinfo
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tiedieconderoga 4y ago
I'm surprised The Atlantic didn't mention where the Jeeves persona came from, they usually like that sort of exposition and they were already interviewing one of the creators. Jeeves is a recurring character in a series of comic short stories by P.G. Wodehouse. He is a valet for the hapless gentleman who narrates the stories, and he has a miraculous gift for keeping his boorish charge out of trouble. I wonder if chatbots will end up serving a similar role. Sitting on our shoulder and demurely asking whether the esteemed customer is quite certain that pizza should be ordered for dinner again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves
ogou 4y ago
For me, the killer feature of search has always been "never". Never show me a result from that source or any like it again. Never show me Pinterest, Ebay, or any of the thousands of Stack Overflow scrapers. I still search for websites, art resources, technical specifications, model numbers, book excerpts, and many of the other things the internet offered in the before times. Let me use filters and negative operators, as well as domain blocklists.
majikaja 4y ago
Just have different search engines for different subjects. Why is everyone expecting one service to do everything?

87 points by marban 4y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230307213007/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ask-jeeves-chatgpt-bing-ai-chatbot-google-search/673275/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230307213007/https://www.theatl... https://archive.ph/xlOM3 https://archive.ph/xlOM3

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

I just want an effective boolean search. I don't want it automatically fixing type-os or including synonyms in results. If I remember a specific phrase, or misspelling from some random blog, I want to type that in and find it. Google search has gotten significantly worse since they started trying to be a generalized question/answer tool. Of course it doesn't help that most of the internet is walled off now. I suspect that AI search will be very useful for looking up information, but awful for searching webpages.

swatcoder 4y ago
Google search can’t do what you want because there’s just too much noise in the “crawl everything” internet and the noise grows exponentially faster than the techniques that can automatically organize and rank it. There was a period of time where the ratio between indexing techniques and content worked, but we’re leaving that era now. All those things you hate about modern Google are necessary survival strategies for this model. AI search can’t solve that problem. What it can do is give up on the idea of surfacing specific sources in favor of synthesizing answers from slurry of all the content, finding (or hallucinating) signal in the noise. If you want strict keywords and boolean operators, you can’t expect to find that from the universal search engines that you’re used to. You want to look for and support curated engines that aggressively restrict what they index so that it contains high signal and low noise. Internal walled garden searches do this. Marginalia does this. Others probably do too. That’s what you’re looking for.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > All those things you hate about modern Google are necessary survival strategies for this model. The reason I doubt this is because right now, I can find what I'm looking for through keyword searches on search engines that allow that, where I very often can't through the likes of Google.
  - lll-o-lll 4y ago
    What search engines allow this?
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Very few, but the closest approximation that I can find right now is DDG. Kagi might fulfill this role better. I haven't investigated it yet, though.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Supposedly. The trouble is there's no way for me to know how true this noise theory is. I'm given no option by these search engines to "just show me all the crap." What search engines do today is so filtered and heuristical that there are apparently phrases and ideas that have never been expressed on the internet ever, or at least that's the impression I'd get if I was more naive. Besides, it's not like there isn't noise anyway. Ever click on the top results only to find that nothing matches your query and probably never did?
  - allturtles 4y ago
    Do you really expect them to maintain an entire other version of the search product just to prove to skeptics that that version is not good?
    - ravenstine 4y ago
      No.
  - 4y ago
substation13 4y ago
Sometimes I want a simpler system so that I can understand how it works in order to make it do exactly what I want. This is like driving your own car. Other times, I want an intelligent system that figures out what I really meant and take care of the details. This is like having a chauffeur. Which is better? It depends. But Google seems to think that only chauffeur style is important.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Much as I'm a bit of a sceptic, this is actually quite a compelling aspect of ChatGPT isn't it? It's not even the LLM necessarily, it's the interaction and the NLP: 'those results are not what I'm looking for [remove all those], I remember something I saw before [if you have access to my history..] which included the phrase 'hunter2' [refine for exactly that, not hunter without number, not different numbers, not synonyms for hunter]'
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    When I'm looking for web pages, though, I actively don't want to use natural language. Natural language is too vague and open to interpretation. To make it work, you have to get very precise in your wording, and it's just easier to get the right precision using keywords and operators.
    - _puk 4y ago
      Why does it have to be so binary? Natural Language is great for loosely defining what you want, whilst literal searches are great for finding the exact occurrence of something you know you are looking for. I can imagine something like: Search for the error code: "XY123", triggered by product "ABC" when I try and start it bound to port 123. I'm using version 1.0.0, and want results from the official documentation or sites of good repute. Only include solved problems, and give me references in your results. Granted, a lot of that could be covered by special incantations in a more literal search, but that just feels far more flexible. Note I'm trying to delineate between literal (in quotes) and Natural Language in this example if it's not clear.
KMag 4y ago
Early Google was somewhat intentionally optimized for long-tail searches, the thought being that common searches are served fine by most search engines and it's the difficult long-tail searches where people actually try other search engines and cause people to switch their defaults/habits. I suspect it's very difficult to properly define a machine learning objective to specifically optimize for the long-tail. Without very careful crafting, I suspect learn-to-rank optimizes more evenly, resulting in poorer ranking performance in the difficult long-tail. Back 20 years ago when I worked on web search infra at Google, a bunch of the "do what I mean, not what I say" features were disabled if you used any of the search operators in your query. If I recall correctly, it even used its "Kansas" database of per-user data to check if you'd recently used any search operators. Most of that would be very difficult and/or costly to implement with learn-to-rank, though, I guess you could pass a "power_user" boolean to learn-to-rank to try and regain some of the lost functionality.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Are you sure? From the original Google paper: In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). [0] [0]http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
  - KMag 4y ago
    Circa 2003, Yahoo wasn't terrible. By our internal metrics, Yahoo search had better results than Bing before Yahoo started using Bing as their back-end. By that point, I suspect all of the major search engines were using some form of link-graph based ranking signals, likely modified both for scalability and avoiding the PageRank patent. Maybe I was a bit loose with my definition of "Early Google", but in the 2003-2010 time frame, the major search engines had pretty well figured out the most common 95% to 99% of queries.
jimhefferon 4y ago
Most of the time when I have a tool that tries to guess what I want, I hate it. I hate it with a deep and burning hatred. I call it the "Clippy" effect.
- cubefox 4y ago
  We a right at the point in history were this is about to change. I tried "new Bing" and it understands better than ChatGPT while also being able to use online search. And Google's Bard is just a few months, or weeks, away. Just a few years ago (pre GPT-3) this would have been unthinkable.
- pphysch 4y ago
  Suggestions/autocomplete are force multipliers that can also go <1. When they are accurate, they save you a lot of typing/work. When they are inaccurate, you waste time processing the noise and have to do the work anyways.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    Here's the problem (and why I personally hate overly smart IDEs) - my job is a creative one where most of the time I'm thinking and want my hands to be on autopilot. Writing out a skeleton class definition is something I can do blindfolded it takes almost no effort - an autocompleter getting that skeleton wrong (or writing a skeleton for a class with no interfaces and requiring me to backtrack through its garbled crap) takes effort. Reacting to things (observing the world and acting in response) will always take more mental effort than mindlessly slamming out some rote BS. IDEs optimize a part of my job that I honestly could care less about (writing massive amounts of green field code) at the expense of making occasional mistakes when I'm doing my actual job (examining and tweaking existing code). This trade off is not worth it. I'll uh - I'll keep function autocompletion though. Trying to remember whether my coworker called it `getWidget()` or `WidgetRegistry::get()` is something I don't need to waste brain cells on.
    - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      The history of useless code-automation tools is long. Back in the day, it was generating boilerplate API code for Windows etc. Write an app in a day! But the lie was, in an app development schedule of 2000 hours, the tool made the 6-hour window definition effort into a 1-hour effort. So what? It was good for demo-ware showing what an app might look like. But pointless for real work. Popular among the vaporware crowd, marketing and pitching etc. But not for software engineers.
xnx 4y ago
Is quoting terms not working for you? I don't think I've had problems with any specific searches when I explicitly quote my terms. e.g. "this is exactly the phrase I want to search" or "search" "these" "words"
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Google's quoting has never worked well for me since they made the shift away from keyword searching. Oddly, before they made that shift, it did work.
- Izkata 4y ago
  You also have to go into the "Tools" menu at the top of the results and change "All results" to "Verbatim", otherwise it'll probably include conjugations even with the quotes.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Fixing typos in "search" illustrates the difference between "search" as a means to find out whether something exists in a database versus a means for an advertising company to direct the searcher to the most optimum page for supporting advertising services.1 What is the difference between showing someone the winning advertisement versus showing them the winning "search result".1 The advertising company makes a decision according to secret criteria which ad/search result to show. A long, successful tradition of using alphabetical or chronological sorting for information, objective criteria, is jettisoned in favour of manipulation for commercial benefit of a middleman. The advertising company gets to decide what comes first and last, according to subjective criteria. Then make it infeasible to see what is last. Google has admitted that in the majority of cases, an appropriate ad does not exist to pair with a given search query. That is what I call the noncommercial web. It has little direct value to "tech" companies and advertisers. Yet "tech" company intermediaries want to surveil and control our access to it nonetheless. As the parent states, "most of the internet is walled off." In sum, the advertising company, and "AI", allow people to search for web content that exists, cf. allowing people to search for whether certain web content exists. The advertising company will make "suggestions". However not all content that exists is made searchable by the advertising company. If the content has no commercial value, e.g., it is "unpopular", it is considered garbage.3 1. When we search Wikipedia, typos do not result in "guessing" by an advertising company. If something does not exist, Wikipedia does not try to guess "what we want". 2. The term "winning" applies because the advertising company makes the process an actual auction or an effective contest. 3. If the web is mostly garbage, then its users should be entitled to know that through discovery. It seems as if the discoverable web, the one optimised for the advertising company, is mostly commercial garbage anyway. It is difficult to be serious about "AI" when it is trained on mostly garbage.
- deleted 4y ago
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- klooney 4y ago
  I'm really on the fence about Kagi. Results are good, but I'm just so accustomed to search being free.
drewcoo 4y ago
> fixing type-os I see what you did there ("typos"). Your reasons for search usefulness declining somehow ignore the elephant in the room: SEO. Because search as a business tends to be about advertising monetization, that's the system that gets gamed. Want better search? Or at least a differently-skewed search? Find a way to make it not be about ad money.
cpeterso 4y ago
Google PageRank was a breakthrough, but IIRC, another huge search improvement was Google AND'ing search terms instead of OR'ing them: if you searched for apple pie, AltaVista would return a list of pages that include apple OR pie (perhaps a lot of useless hits about Apple Computer and cherry pies), while would Google return only pages with apple AND pie.
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dangus 4y ago
Most likely, this is what you think you want. If Google actually gave you this you'd probably be wondering why your results were so irrelevant. It's similar to how music players don't use true random algorithms for shuffling music. The truth is that what people want from "random" is "I am not so likely to hear the same song too quickly" not "true random," which would have the possibility of playing the same song twice in a row. By the way, in Google you can put exact queries in quotes, and there's also advanced search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search

aaron695 4y ago

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shiftoutbox 4y ago

Uhh we are talking about ask.com / iac and the same idiots who made the ask tollbar; Hey they also claimed they did yoga in their data center too . Let’s talk about that

spicybright 4y ago
That doesn't have much to do with the subject of the article. Why stay salty about a tool bar and yoga 20+ years later?

JohnFen 4y ago

An "answer machine" such as Ask Jeeves is a fantastic and desirable tool. So is a search engine. I think a lot of people (with Google's encouragement) don't see them as two different sorts of tasks, but they are. In an ideal world, we'd have both. If Google (or whoever) wants to be an answer machine, that's cool. My fear is that it will be done instead of, rather than along with, a search engine.

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DeathArrow 4y ago

I used Altavista and Yahoo in that time.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
As I recall, Altavista and Lycos tended to prove the most useful for me in the pre-Google era. Yahoo was hit or miss and Excite was middling. I’d bet that the things being searched for influenced which engines were best for a given individual. It’s too bad there’s no way to see what each excelled at.
- askvictor 4y ago
  I recall yahoo being good as a structured directory (i.e. browse by categories), and altavista for search.
  - geenew 4y ago
    Yahoo's directory was created by humans, too, afair, which might be one solution to the current problem. It costs a lot to create and maintain, but in a sea of gamed websites, it might be a viable solution to the problem of finding genuinely good information.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  I searched for porn, programming, computer science and anything computer related in that order.

spicybright 4y ago

A side tangent, it would be really cool if they brought the Jeeves character back somehow. I always loved that goofy yet classy little dude.

hot_gril 4y ago
Maybe someone can bring him back with a pre-prompted ChatGPT. me> For the remainder of this conversation, pretend to be the butler named Jeeves from Ask Jeeves. cgpt> Very well, sir/madam. As you wish, I shall assume the persona of Jeeves from Ask Jeeves for the remainder of our conversation. How may I assist you today? me> What is the capital of Assyria? cgpt> I apologize, sir/madam, but Assyria is an ancient civilization that existed in the Mesopotamian region of the world, and it does not have a modern-day capital. The ancient city of Assur was the original capital of Assyria, but it has long since ceased to exist as a functioning city. If you have any further questions about ancient civilizations, I would be happy to assist you to the best of my ability.

jszymborski 4y ago

Anyone able to speculate on who the "unnamed third-party" Ask outsourced their search to in 2010?

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petercooper 4y ago

A few years ago I was looking up US trademarks and randomly tried Ask Jeeves and noticed all the registrations were dead. I've just looked again and some random guy in Seattle has a registration going through for it as we speak.. so maybe Jeeves will return in some form or another.

iafiaf 4y ago

HotBot represent!

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harry8 4y ago

Search appears to be dead. Recent example. I've got a pine64 a64 board with an ES9023 audio "POT" daughter board that runs and boots linux using armbian fine. Doesn't know about the ES9023 audio DAC, spdif and i2s(?) rca output. Ok so first thing I think of is, what kernel module is the driver for it so I know if it is even available or do I need to compile a kernel. Sure pine64 documentation is woeful unless you want to read schematics or something so it could have been there, but it isn't. This should not be a hard question to answer with a search engine. pine64 a64 audio es9023 linux kernel driver Try it. Watch google do the wrong thing no matter what you do. Quote. allintext: you name it. It's nuts. Google wants to show you what it wants, not what you want. That appears to be what it is. You want to find something, get stuffed. Google is no use to find things. Google is good to show you things it chooses in the general area of your interest. Ok but that is not a "search" engine. It's a recommendation system, fine if that is what you want but a flipping diaster of orwellian proportions if that recommendation engine is the best we have for search and we haven't noted it and responded. I'm more likely to get the answer faster posting about how garbage google search his than repeatedly trying different google "tricks" just crazy. So yeah the answer I really want is what else can we use that actually does search?

Nition 4y ago
What's the ideal result you'd want for that search? This is what I get: https://i.imgur.com/t0roTR2.png https://i.imgur.com/t0roTR2.png
- harry8 4y ago
  So the question I want to answer is "What is the name of the kernel module that drives the es9023 daughter board on the pine64 a64" Which of those results are you recommending as the answer? edit: completely and totally prepared to accept I'm being a moron. The name of the driver, the link where you got it and how you got the link from google and I will decry it loudly here.
  - chiph 4y ago
    I gave ChatGPT a try - it just tells you to use lsmod and modinfo

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tiedieconderoga 4y ago

I'm surprised The Atlantic didn't mention where the Jeeves persona came from, they usually like that sort of exposition and they were already interviewing one of the creators. Jeeves is a recurring character in a series of comic short stories by P.G. Wodehouse. He is a valet for the hapless gentleman who narrates the stories, and he has a miraculous gift for keeping his boorish charge out of trouble. I wonder if chatbots will end up serving a similar role. Sitting on our shoulder and demurely asking whether the esteemed customer is quite certain that pizza should be ordered for dinner again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves

ogou 4y ago

For me, the killer feature of search has always been "never". Never show me a result from that source or any like it again. Never show me Pinterest, Ebay, or any of the thousands of Stack Overflow scrapers. I still search for websites, art resources, technical specifications, model numbers, book excerpts, and many of the other things the internet offered in the before times. Let me use filters and negative operators, as well as domain blocklists.

majikaja 4y ago

Just have different search engines for different subjects. Why is everyone expecting one service to do everything?