I can't believe we left him behind like that.
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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.
The one thing I remember from that time was they had a section on the homepage of Ask Jeeves with recent searches from other users, and there was basically no filter to hide people's searches for porn.
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Lycos has lived longer than 6 generations of dogs.
Why did I make myself sad?If it helps any, my (living) dog was born in 2008. That's only 14 years after Lycos was created.
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I wanna click that Tour the Web link so bad
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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.
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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.
I wonder if they'd still be around had they pivoted to the internet's true purpose.
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I wonder if they'd still be around had they pivoted to the internet's true purpose.
Ask cats?
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Pretend I’m too young to know what this is. What is this? I’m assuming predecessor to Google?
I don’t think predecessor. I think Google was already around. But it tried to be a competing search engine. And it sucked.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]That's amazing, I wish we got that timeline, ahahah!
Oh, sure, yes, we're all friends with Tom... but are you friends with Mimi? All you gotta do is ask =P
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I wonder if they'd still be around had they pivoted to the internet's true purpose.
No. Their leaders at the time weren’t that smart.
I actually worked for a startup that they acquired in January of 2000. As a search startup we had developed a relatively basic text-based advertising system that let folks bid on search terms and get their ads displayed on the search results pages. It was almost 100% automated and we referred to it internally as something that generated “free money” for us.
The executives at Jeeves sold that cash cow off when they acquired us. They said “we’re not in the advertising business”. In October of that same year the company we sold it to relaunched it as Google AdWords.
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I wanna click that Tour the Web link so bad
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.
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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.
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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.
