I can't believe we left him behind like that.
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Fun fact: Back in the early 2000’s Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into adult/porn searches. They went so far as to create a companion character to the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. It was a blonde in a skimpy French maid outfit that they called Mimi, and they even went so far as to register domains like askmimi.com and asksex.com before they scrapped the whole project.
Source: I worked for them for a good part of the 2000’s.
Maybe they were just too early, because apparently search tool "companions" are a thing now.
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Maybe they were just too early, because apparently search tool "companions" are a thing now.
Does it like animate responses or something?
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I don’t think predecessor. I think Google was already around. But it tried to be a competing search engine. And it sucked.
I'm trying to remember if it sucked less than modern search. From memory it was easily worse.
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Holy shit! Search and you get this type of thing as the results.
As far as I can tell, it's just Google Search without the bullshit, them having punted to a branded version of Google instead of maintaining their own DB. That's... actually remarkably useful. I think I will still use DDG but just the idea of using a search engine that's too unpopular for anyone to want to garbage-ify seems very compelling.
wrote last edited by [email protected]That's .net though, the original is https://www.askjeeves.com/ which still exists and is garbage.
.net uses that custom Google search that's usually used for searching on a specific site. https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
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I wonder if they'd still be around had they pivoted to the internet's true purpose.
ask.com still exists
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Does it like animate responses or something?
I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's just an animated character for interacting with the Grok AI, except it's flirty and has "relationship building" mechanics... Probably not the little animal guy though, I hope.
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I was about to make a joke like "Warning, the tour has gotten much longer in the last 2 decades", but then I realized that the internet has consolidated so much that I'm not sure if that's even true.
Yeah, it's like 5 websites now.
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That's .net though, the original is https://www.askjeeves.com/ which still exists and is garbage.
.net uses that custom Google search that's usually used for searching on a specific site. https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
Oh, Jesus. Yeah, that's bad.
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Maybe they were just too early, because apparently search tool "companions" are a thing now.
The fact that Elon Musk is obsessed with Death Note is terrifying.
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In the early days of search engines, people learned all the tricks like + signs and "quotation marks" and then this site was like "what if we just let people ask questions in human readable english?" and it worked about as well as you'd expect such a product from 2001.
"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
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Fun fact: Back in the early 2000’s Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into adult/porn searches. They went so far as to create a companion character to the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. It was a blonde in a skimpy French maid outfit that they called Mimi, and they even went so far as to register domains like askmimi.com and asksex.com before they scrapped the whole project.
Source: I worked for them for a good part of the 2000’s.
That sounds like a fun time to have been part of the tech universe, I presume it was the bounce back from the dotcom boom.
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That sounds like a fun time to have been part of the tech universe, I presume it was the bounce back from the dotcom boom.
It happened at the height of the boom. Ask Jeeves bought our company for over $500 million. As part of the acquisition I and many others were awarded with a hefty pile of stock options, but those options were locked up for a year or so in order to encourage us to stay at the new company. On paper, at the time of the acquisition, my stock options were worth well over $1 million, and the stock price of Jeeves was somewhere around $110.
By the time I could exercise my stock options a year later they were worth under $10,000 and the company stock price was under $1. We were lucky to survive the bubble burst…
Prior to all that it was pretty amazing. Our startup had a game room with pinball, pool, ping pong, etc. and we’d regularly have major discussions while playing a game. The company also bought us lunch every Friday for the better part of two years. And we had a really amazing team of engineers & leaders running the place. I’ve kept in touch with a number of those folks over the years, and have a number of those connections to thank for more than one job I’ve held after that one.
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I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's just an animated character for interacting with the Grok AI, except it's flirty and has "relationship building" mechanics... Probably not the little animal guy though, I hope.
Like, what, you level up with it like a dating sim? I'm creeped out already, just the only things I can think of that melonball would do are even creepier.
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Like, what, you level up with it like a dating sim? I'm creeped out already, just the only things I can think of that melonball would do are even creepier.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I'm not quite sure how structured it is or how far it goes, but I read that the romance-able ones will at least get more affectionate and change into skimpier clothes. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is just the beginning of this type of stuff. I remember seeing a clip of a man who had "fallen in love with" and "proposed" to his chatGPT girlfriend.
There are also already dedicated subreddits where people are building "boyfriends/girlfriends" with LLMs and getting attached.
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I'm not quite sure how structured it is or how far it goes, but I read that the romance-able ones will at least get more affectionate and change into skimpier clothes. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is just the beginning of this type of stuff. I remember seeing a clip of a man who had "fallen in love with" and "proposed" to his chatGPT girlfriend.
There are also already dedicated subreddits where people are building "boyfriends/girlfriends" with LLMs and getting attached.
People are free to do as they wish and they aren't hurting anyone, but also yikes on bikes
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This was the recommended search engine when I was at school. They pushed ask Jeeves so hard in the computer class. I dont think i used it at home though, I might have been on yahoo search due to a sketchy toolbar my mum installed.
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I don’t think predecessor. I think Google was already around. But it tried to be a competing search engine. And it sucked.
I think Google was already around.
No, Ask Jeeves existed before Google.
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I'm not quite sure how structured it is or how far it goes, but I read that the romance-able ones will at least get more affectionate and change into skimpier clothes. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is just the beginning of this type of stuff. I remember seeing a clip of a man who had "fallen in love with" and "proposed" to his chatGPT girlfriend.
There are also already dedicated subreddits where people are building "boyfriends/girlfriends" with LLMs and getting attached.
Damn, they have a whole damn sub for this? Depressing...
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I'm not quite sure how structured it is or how far it goes, but I read that the romance-able ones will at least get more affectionate and change into skimpier clothes. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is just the beginning of this type of stuff. I remember seeing a clip of a man who had "fallen in love with" and "proposed" to his chatGPT girlfriend.
There are also already dedicated subreddits where people are building "boyfriends/girlfriends" with LLMs and getting attached.
I ... Yow. That Rick Sanchez one says a lot about the person who fantasizes being in that relationship.
