7 ms·
Ask.com has closed
- xivzgrev 5mo agolaunched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!
- DANmode 5mo agoSmall language model(s).
- justinator 5mo agoIronic that Ask Jeeves faked being an AI before AI completely overshadowed Ask Jeeves.
- EricRiese 5mo agoPour one out
- arm32 5mo agoSad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...
- tptacek 5mo agoWas it ever good?
- Mistletoe 5mo agoYeah 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
- bfsjjdjdfj 5mo agoDuring 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.
- stingraycharles 5mo agoNone 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.
- bandrami 5mo agoAnd 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.
- rsync 5mo agoAltavista 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.
- zorked 5mo agoIt is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.
- seanmcdirmid 5mo agoI 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.
- jfil 5mo agoI used to read through search engine patents back in 2006-7 when I was an SEO consultant. I could see the same names from the AltaVista patents later start appearing as authors on the Google patents.
- mrandish 5mo agoAgreed. 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.
- bandrami 5mo agoYes. 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.
- spike021 5mo agoI very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.
- tempaccount5050 5mo agoI think that and dogpile were the best in that short area before google took off as the clear winner.
- serf 5mo agoask 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.
- DANmode 5mo agoWAS being given They’re done.
- DANmode 5mo agoBetween ‘97-2000, arguably.
- gizajob 5mo agoNo 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.
- ryukoposting 5mo agoIt 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.
- IshKebab 5mo agoNo. It never worked as advertised, was never as good as the competition and only really had any success because of the quirky theme.
- toraway 5mo agoBack when being taught how to use the internet in schools was still a thing, I would see vestigial references to Ask Jeeves included as an alternative to Google that “let you use natural sentences”. With a 0% success rate every time I tried.
- ThinkingGuy 5mo agoI was trying to explain to my grandmother (born in 1923) what the Internet was. So I pulled up Ask Jeeves and typed in, "What's the weather in [grandmother's hometown, population 4000]. And the precise current forecast came up. That was in 1997.
- sixo 5mo agoMissed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
- NewJazz 5mo agoMaybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.
- pailingems 5mo agoTwo 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.
- DANmode 5mo agoYou 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!
- johnzim 5mo ago
- Lorin 5mo agoWould have been a great domain with the rise of AI, shocking they didn't adapt the persona.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- esseph 5mo agoHuh. https://www.askjeeves.com https://www.askjeeves.com is that a spoof of ask.com?
- UltraSane 5mo agoI wonder what it was like working for them.
- paradoxyl 5mo agoas 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.
- bsimpson 5mo agoI 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.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5mo agoi believe they also bought vimeo and livestream.com, and proceeded to miss the boat where Youtube took off.
- bonzini 5mo agoVimeo was bought by Bending Spoons. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
- dchest 5mo agoThat 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".
- bsimpson 5mo ago
- abhinavsharma 5mo agoDid they get a great deal for the domain from an AI lab?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- randfur 5mo agoNo shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?
- gyan 5mo agoYeah, what is the recognition of Jeeves/Wooster among the millennials?
- duped 5mo agoI 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.
- jemmyw 5mo agoAs 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".
- fudgeonastick 5mo agohttps://ask.com/ 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.
- NitpickLawyer 5mo agoYahoo.com should be your next one :)
- arm32 5mo agoI'd be willing to be ask.com will always resolve to a pingable IP address, that's a HOT domain name.
- qingcharles 5mo agoI'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.
- Barbing 5mo agoStill 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
- einsteinx2 5mo agoHaha yep yahoo has been mine forever for the same reason stated by the OP
- waynesonfire 5mo agoAol.com for me.
- eresonance 5mo agoMine is https://www.red.com/ 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.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060505141837/http://www.red.co...
- jsweojtj 5mo agoI want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.
- buildsjets 5mo agoOh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist. https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgeebs.com/geebs.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...
- pailingems 5mo ago[flagged]
- oofbey 5mo agoNicely done
- leke 5mo agoNice, I guess nobody is going to bother my Ask Alko side project now.
- antonvs 5mo agoDid he comply? Because it seems like that site would clearly have been covered by the protection for parody.
- buildsjets 5mo agoI’m not sure an unhealthy fascination with incest, underaged Catholic schoolgirls and see-thru mesh shirts constitutes an affirmative defense as parody. Also the whole thing was running on a university server, ‘twas simpler times.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- firefoxd 5mo agoWhere do I buy it? Who wants to join me and buy it together?
- lldb 5mo agoIt's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
- tech234a 5mo agoYou can also see the various rejected wordings for the page in the commit history.
- qingcharles 5mo agoAnd now people submitting PRs :D
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gandazgul 5mo agoWow thanks! I'll actually merge this lol
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cube00 5mo agoAll the history is now gone and replaced with a single "Initial commit" You can see view the history they've erased at and going back from https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/94cf10aa01524f6a6977d6f3d597e3d67f0d73ec https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/94cf10aa0152... Including this interesting removed quote: Search hasn’t been a strategic focus for IAC for some time and as user behavior shifted and the search landscape has become more complex, our search businesses have faced increasing challenges. https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90dcae02ade5be399d215edc97d122f1b028db0c https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90dcae02ade5...
- solomonb 5mo agoMan as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
- w-ll 5mo agoWhat a great game/mod on the og hl1
- magic_hamster 5mo agoBest comment I've read this week.
- namegulf 5mo agoYou have a great and well known domain name, why not launch a GPT powered LLM on it? It's a huge opportunity.
- sgammon 5mo agoEnd of an era
- cyode 5mo ago“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.
- domfletcher 5mo agoObligatory 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."
- tux033 5mo agoThe 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 https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=212
- avazhi 5mo agoBeen 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.
- nephihaha 5mo agoIt was good when it started, but it has been useless for at least ten or fifteen years now.
- chris_wot 5mo agoNo more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.
- Anamon 5mo agoThe way computing and the web have developed over the past two decades, I even feel nostalgic for Bonzi Buddy.
- sanswork 5mo agoFor 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)
- cwnyth 5mo agoI'd love to see a write-up of this if you ever get the chance.
- sanswork 5mo agoThere 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.
- JKCalhoun 5mo ago"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…
- sanswork 5mo agoI 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.
- treelover 5mo ago"Jeeves’ spirit endures" It sure does.
- shevy-java 5mo agoI 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.
- bxvvgd 5mo agoThere are alternatives that dont depend on Google, like duckduckgo but the results are still not as good in more specific questions (in my experience)
- delis-thumbs-7e 5mo agohttps://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- raptor99 5mo agohttps://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com
- jpadkins 5mo agoask.com hasn't been an independent search engine for decades. Its results and ads came from other companies.
- LowLevelKernel 5mo agoCan I buy the domain?
- booleandilemma 5mo agoI 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.
- langtonsuncle 5mo agoSame, I started using the internet around 2007-ish and even then my sister and I were still convinced that you had to use Ask.com if you wanted to ask the internet a question. I have fond memories of that time.
- colinb 5mo agoI 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).
- GalaxyNova 5mo agotruly the end of an era
- Animats 5mo agoNext, Yahoo Search? (It's still live.)
- nephihaha 5mo agoI believe Yahoo now piggybacks off Bing. Like most search engines now, it mostly returns a limited range of results from "approved" sources.
- leke 5mo agoI thought I remembered using this in the 90s when it was Ask Jeeves.
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoWhat 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 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.
- zelphirkalt 5mo agoFor 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.
- krater23 5mo agoUntil now I thought ask.com was only a scam site with no real existing service that users are using by choice.
- mrweasel 5mo agoOnce 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?
- sm0olr 5mo agoI 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.
- gandazgul 5mo agoI 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.
- ndiddy 5mo agoWhat are they having you work on now that they’re shutting down search?
- MrDrMcCoy 5mo agoAnyone 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gandazgul 5mo agoIt 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.
- garganzol 5mo agoThey don't seem to serve ads on their farewell page. Such a lost opportunity.
- petterroea 5mo agoFor anyone who hasn't used ask recently, ask.com was just showing results from websites ask themselves owned.
- nephihaha 5mo agoAsk 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.
- radku 5mo agoHope ask.com knowledge can be preserved in open source LLMs for future generations.
- hashlock_p2p 5mo agosad to see this
- hashlock_p2p 5mo agosad :(
- hashlock_p2p 5mo agoI am sad to see this
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoIt’s weird to close it right as chatbots are all the rage.
- geoffbp 5mo agoPeople still use ask.com? Don’t know if I have for a long time
- loloquwowndueo 5mo agoThey don’t. Hence why it’s shutting down.
- hyperbovine 5mo agoAt Chabot Science Center there is still (and, presumably, will always be) the Ask Jeeves Planetarium. Makes you think about the transiency of it all.
- mbeavitt 5mo agoIn 6 months we’re gonna see a HN thread: “I bought ask.com for £250k - here’s what I did with it”
- unicorn_cowboy 5mo agoSomeone make a Jeeves chatbot where he opines about missing the good ol' days of assisting curious strangers on the world wide web.
- boudin 5mo agoI 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
- apexalpha 5mo agoDutch 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.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoAny Windows release that was based on NT had the notion of users and administrators. It was just that in the default setup, the user account was also an administrator.
- apexalpha 5mo agoSince Vista they added a prompt, the UAC. But since they required it for almost anything people trained themselves to just hit Yes on everything.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoEven Oracle on windows would install an Ask toolbar in IE if you didn't untick the pre-selected checkbox in the installer. I always thought that was weird, for software that expensive to be including an IE toolbar for what, a few pennies more of revenue?
- shawryadev 5mo ago[flagged]
- jeffalyanak 5mo agoAt least queryquinton.com is still alive.
- jeffalyanak 5mo agoAt least queryquinton is still around: https://queryquinton.com/ https://queryquinton.com/
- phplovesong 5mo agoAskjeeves 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
- nephihaha 5mo agoIt was pretty revolutionary when it started. The results definitely declined over time.
- fortran77 5mo agoThat 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.
- pmdr 5mo agoThe 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.
- vincefutr23 5mo agoWeird because after decades oddly the tech now perfectly supports their original format
- ticulatedspline 5mo agoSame thought, feels like turning around just before you reach the destination. ask.com and Jeeves were established brands perfectly poised to dive head first into LLM land.
- asciimov 5mo agoI haven’t thought about Ask Jeeves in a good long while. For a brief time in the late 90s they were my go to search engine and my recommendation for those new to the net.
- theanonymousone 5mo agoI'm wondering which AI lab will bid for the domain.
- altairprime 5mo ago*has already, I suspect
- sodafountan 5mo agoThe rise of LLM's had to have played a part in their demise, at least under whatever IOC is. Could very well be that there's an AI startup aiming to use the brand to its benefit, but it's more likely the leadership teams saw massive declines in what I'm sure was an already dismal amount of traffic.
- kandros 5mo agoNext Quora? I don’t think I have ever found a useful thing here
- carimura 5mo agoa multi-billion dollar IPO and a quarter century later, the finale is a single static file hosted on github pages.... https://ask.com/some404url https://ask.com/some404url
- crest 5mo agoGood riddance. The only thing they deserve to be remembered for is their fucking "tool" bar malware.
- amitbidlan 5mo agoJeeves was just too early — natural language queries in 1997, before anyone called it conversational AI.
- RomanHauksson 5mo agoThe page seems AI-generated, it has a few front-end Claudeisms: - PlayFair Display and Inter as fonts - Comments in the HTML for each section ("<!-- Main Content -->" and "<!-- The Logo -->") - Bottom fade-in animation - Tailwind (obviously a common choice for humans, but since it's an even more common choice for LLMs, it counts as evidence in favor)
- cube00 5mo agoLots more AI-looking sections now removed in https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90629dbe5ffba776d838abdcc653a14796ee28cd https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90629dbe5ffb...
- Anamon 5mo agoI think that's fair for a static "end of service" notice which probably, almost by definition, won't be worked on further.
- RomanHauksson 5mo agoI think so too, wasn't ascribing any value judgement.
- hashlock_p2p 5mo agosad to see this again
- Aeroi 5mo agois this the biggest missed pivot of all time?