Listen here you little shit. Ask jeeves used to be the tits, until Dogpile which was a metasearch of several other indexers. Then a scrappy little startup with a stupid name made everyone else obsolete
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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with a stupid name
With a stupid misspelled name. They wanted googol but misspelled it when registering the domain name.
They also wanted BackRub at one time lol
Back in the 90’s Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” and not a search engine. They had teams of human editors that would curate answers for popular questions. During the dot com boom of the late 90’s they realized they needed to automate that system so they started buying other small startups that were doing more with search technologies. They acquired one search company in New Jersey called Teoma and another in Massachusetts called Direct Hit.
The executives at Jeeves at the time were not very smart though. They were very hands on with these technologies they didn’t fully understand and made some stupid decisions. For example, Direct Hit had a simple advertising platform they had developed where anybody could sign up and bid for ad placement on search results pages. It was largely automated and generated a lot of revenue. The Jeeves CEO said “we’re not in the business of advertising so get rid of it”, so it was sold off. It was sold to that scrappy little startup you mentioned and transformed into AdWords. Jeeves squandered other tech advantages in similar ways.
In a similar vein, they had a huge internal project for many months to create an adult (porn) search engine that they were going to co-brand alongside the Jeeves character they used to use. They planned to call it “Ask Mimi” and had registered domains, created a French maid character to go along with the Jeeves butler character, etc. After a huge push the company decided they didn’t want to tarnish their image with porn and dropped it all pretty much overnight. There used to be an article about all this archived on CNet’s news.com site but I can’t find it anymore thanks to their terrible search engine….
Source: I worked for one of those startups that Jeeves acquired.
Hah that's pretty funny. Some shit doesn't change in tech 😁
I never liked Ask Jeeves, there were several other searches available at the time, though admittedly I can't remember any of them now, ask Jeeves seemed to be a worse version of one of the others.
Asta la vista
Alta Vista? That was good search engine. Did I trample on the joke :/
I think there was actually a "darknet" version of altavista that was called Astalavista too. If you were sailing the high seas back then, or looking for the anarchists cookbook, for research purposes.
Oh wow. A very housebound friend of mine read that, always talked about the floppy disk recipe - weedkiller on one side and sugar on the other, when the computer read it - Kaboom!
I remember reading it when I was maybe 14?
The floppy disk bomb stands out as a favourite. Back then I was reading it with zero intention of ever doing any of it, just curiosity. Thank Christ I’m not a Teenager today, would 100% be on a watch list for reading that shit now.
I recall using Web Spider on Netscape Navigator circa 1997 or so. Then Yahoo! was the big deal for a few years before Google
I remember using ask jeeves a few times in school. Then it was instantly only Google.
Ask Jeeves already started sucking when they got rid of Jeeves himself. They lost sight of what was important.
Oh great. Now you've fucking conjured him.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with dapper moustache and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by an AI bro,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Silicon Valley to be born?