Ask.com has closed

For 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)

Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.

“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.

Oh my, I remember the time they sent a friend of mine a cease-and-desist.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001017194117/http://www.askgee...

Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.

It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com

Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...

Where do I buy it? Who wants to join me and buy it together?

I want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.

Next, Yahoo Search? (It's still live.)

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.

No shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?

The 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

You have a great and well known domain name, why not launch a GPT powered LLM on it?

It's a huge opportunity.

Can I buy the domain?

truly the end of an era

I 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).

"Jeeves’ spirit endures"

It sure does.

I 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.

No more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.

Would have been a great domain with the rise of AI, shocking they didn't adapt the persona.

I 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.

Pour one out

Huh. https://www.askjeeves.com is that a spoof of ask.com?

Did they get a great deal for the domain from an AI lab?

End of an era

launched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!

I wonder what it was like working for them.

Been 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.