Ask.com has closed (ask.com)

Pour one out

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

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

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

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

I wonder what it was like working for them.

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

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

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.

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

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...

launched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!

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

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

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

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

It's a huge opportunity.

End of an era

“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.

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

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.

No more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.

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)

"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.