Ask Jeeves just shut down after 29 years, and nobody noticed
1d 11h ago by fedia.io/u/ryujin470 in technology from www.xda-developers.com
The ask jeeves that recently died is not the ask jeeves that people remember. It was sold to some other company ages ago that turned it into a google search that only returned weird, scammy results.
Ah, thank you. Now I don't feel bad that it died recently. I still feel bad it died decades ago. Along with Myspace.
RIP Myspace. You were beautiful.
Apparently whoever wrote that headline isn't on Lemmy, it was posted all over here the last few days
I'm all over here, and I never saw it. Here, hold this pickle while I tie my shoes.
hands you a pickle from the pickle jar
Careful. It's dill.
A big dill?
In seriousness, "all over" may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but there were 4 posts in various communities yesterday covering it, including 2 in this one
Wow ... I think AskJeeves was the first major search engine I relied on when I first started going online. That and 'Dogpile'. I remember a friend of ours bugging me to check out a thing called 'Google' at the time.
I think my first might have been alta vista.
And Astala Vista for game cracks.
I thought that one was for hunting terminators.
and warez.com and all of the ones that came after it
Same
Same
I remember back in like 4th grade when my school was just introducing us to the internet, they told us about the big (I think 6) search engines, which, if I recall, were
Yahoo, AltaVista, hotbot, lycos, ask Jeeves, and northern light
And then they also mentioned Google, which was still pretty new and hadn't yet cemented its place in the internet yet. But they did say that Google had more results than the others, and that was all we needed to hear as kids and I think we all immediately started using Google almost exclusively.
Soooooo, the thing I don't get about your memory, unless your school year is different, is that google would have debuted when you were on summer break, and it would have been #1 by the time your next school year started. It went from unfounded, to market leader in about 10 weeks.
The same thing a year later with ebay. Early internet was a big open space, and everything was free real estate.
It's very possible that I'm misremembering, we are talking about a memory from almost 30 years ago from when I was a little kid
There's also a very real chance that I was simply taught wrong, I wouldn't exactly say that most of my elementary school teachers were particularly techy and probably not actually keeping up to date on search engines.
From what I could find though (after a quick Google search funnily enough, not really interested in doing any in-depth research) the Google domain was registered September 1997, and the company was officially founded September 1998. I don't know if google.com actually went live on either of those dates, somewhere in-between or maybe shortly after (it does seem that they were up and running by August 1998 because that's when the first Google doodle appeared) but in either case my school district usually started school in late August or early September so that timing seems like it would work out to me.
And even if it did launch at the end of the previous school year or over the summer break, summer break is only around 10-12 weeks so we would have been coming back just as Google was taking that top spot (if indeed it did do so that quickly, another search shows a lot of results saying that it didn't get that big until around 2000, again, not going to fact-check that too closely because I just don't care that much)
I remember my class went to the school library, and the librarian showed us how to use AskJeeves for the first time. I also remember using Dogpile, wow I haven't thought about that in over 20 years
Dogpile is still sort of around, as is Webcrawler. As little more than URLs. They're basically the same as Startpage, all owned by the same company (System1).
Dogpile ruled
No one noticed? It’s been plastered all over the internet for the last week…
They had the perfect name and brand for an AI pivot. Ask Jeeves' whole thing was that you could ask in plain language instead of some broken English search terms.
We've come full circle. Now Google works better with sentences instead of keywords and modifiers.
https://streamff.com/v/0295c684
That is an example of AskJeeves in all of its glory. Out of all the search engines, AskJeeves was in the best position to use AI and pretend to be somebody answering a question. But the reality is, it was a terrible search engine with results that were unrelated to the question most of the time.
Some of these old search engines should go full porn before giving up. There aren't really a lot of great porn aggregators/search engines out there.
Funnily enough Ask Jeeves tried this in the 2000s. They bought domains like AskSex.com when exploring ways to stay relevant.
Surprised they didn't turn it into yet another AI!
They ran out of money long before LLMs took over the search business.
I assumed they shut down decades ago. 🤷♂️
When Ask Jeeves became Ask.com, it was the end of everything. The whole innovation was that the engine was made to focus on keywords - which was immediately mimicked by Google the moment they stopped being BackRub.
WAHHHH Ask Jeeves needs your attention
I hate people like this
"Nobody noticed..." a lot of people did. They just dont know anybody who knew it...
Ha, I definitely used it ironically a couple of times over the last 25 years. R.i.p buddy, you'll be missed..
I noticed
People mourn in different ways.
I was surprised it was still around. I think it was the first internet search I used. I suppose I read about it in a magazine? Remember magazines?
I remember using keywords on AOL, that worked like a search for AOL, before AOL had an internet browser.
Fuck I'm old.
Now that, with AI, you could really just ask...