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sanswork
JKCalhoun
"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…"
Hurricane Electric comes to mind. A friend rents rack space there and I tagged along a few times when he was installing a new server, etc. Wild place. A bit of security to even get in. In one of the huge rooms where his rented rack is, 5 meters or so of racks with the same noisy hardware—"Might be Pinterest", my friend suggested.
Other racks literally enclosed within a welded wire cage…
otterley
My company's cage was the unfortunate neighbor of Google's cage at Exodus SC3 in Santa Clara. Even then, Google's compute density was much higher than industry standards. They didn't rack-mount their servers; they basically extracted every part that wound be in a case (motherboard, PSU, disks, heat sinks, etc.) and laid it on a cork board shelf. They then placed the boards two units deep, so if you needed to service the unit in back, you'd have to remove the unit in front first. These were all wired like spaghetti to an HP switch sitting on top of the cabinet. It looked like a meth head's house. Here's a photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#/media/Fil...
Anyway, the heat emanating from their space was absolutely insane. Our servers would have random thermal shutdowns because their excess heat was penetrating our space, and this impacted our overall ability both to serve and to get some sleep as we were paged 24x7.
This was before modern cold/hot aisle DC designs, so the only thing that could be done was for the colo facility to add more air conditioning. They set up some spot coolers that helped, but we moved to a different facility about as fast we could.
sanswork
I ended up with a host called GoGrid since they were able to offer a mix of dedicated servers and cloud for when we needed to burst and they had space in 365 Main Street SF. I went to visit their team while in town and they took me for a tour of the data centre and it was very much like that with them pointing to random racks as being owned by X, Y, and Z. It feels embarrassing to say but I was a bit star struck by the servers.
kstrauser
I worked at GoGrid and this is one of the first times I’ve heard someone mention it who wasn’t an employee.
And yeah, the data center was fun to visit.
macNchz
They were arbing keywords through this: they'd place ads directly on Google for low-cost keywords, which would link to an ask.com search results page that itself would display Google ads through that partnership, but with a UI designed (more than Google itself) to trick people into clicking them. Seemingly they were able to find combinations that made this profitable.
The "Search Partner network" in general is one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers: unless you turn it off, you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users on sketchy results pages that you have no real insight into, not just the Google results page itself. The traffic from them is garbage.
jfil
>one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers
The average advertiser has no clue about this. Google's role in the advertising ecosystem has been as a scammer and monopolist for many years now. Unfortunately, every major ad network learned from them, and they all have a similar trick default setting.
The latest scam from Google is PMAX, where you YOLO your placements/ad creative/landing page combos to Google and they optimize it automatically. This serves as an optimal mechanism to funnel your ads to the most fraudulent publishers, who's army of employees fills out your forms and bypasses bot protections most effectively. Google's team will then helpfully recommend to "ummm... maybe block their IPs?". Absolute racket.
falcor84
> you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users
Knowing some scammy advertisers, I think that many are happy to pay to show their ads only to confused users
cwnyth
I'd love to see a write-up of this if you ever get the chance.
sanswork
There really isn't too much more to it but happy to try and answer any specific questions. I wasn't involved in the business dealings at all so I have no clue why it happened. System was originally written in PHP and I later rewrote it in Erlang as we got more sources so I could contact all the networks for ads at the same time. It was a very lightweight system the click handler was the heavier one.
sixo
Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.
johnzim
One of the best improvements to my life was adding the following to my LLM Prompt: "Please respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories".
Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.
nomilk
I feel dumb but I’d not previously made the Ask Jeeves and Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse novels connection!
chatmasta
And I’ve just made the Woodhouse from Archer connection!
james_marks
In your defense, the Jeeves character became part of the zeitgeist on its own, as the generic perfect butler.
I knew “Jeeves” decades before I knew (and came to love) Wodehouse.
benrutter
> the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well.
This is such a good pairing! Part of the fun of the stories is that its never clear whether Jeeves' suggestions are genuis, or overconfident but insane japes, I feel like this dynamic puts LLM hallucinations into a role where they're just part of the fun.
delis-thumbs-7e
I’m building a private chatbot for myself so as not to be tripped every time Claude has an ”update”, andthis was one of the first things I implemented. With very strict system prompt of no sycophancy and calling me Sir, it works really well.
luotuoshangdui
Has anyone tried Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me these silly questions." Could be fun.
calgoo
I use Marvin from the Star Force space opera book series. He loves sensors and information, and adds a level of challenge to counters the llm obsession with answering in over happy terms. I had Claude write me a character bible that I can include in projects to keep it consistent.
tigerlily
I have done this as well, to the amusement and bafflement of my colleagues.
hnlmorg
This is a genius idea and I’m going to shamelessly steal it!
Thanks for sharing.
alex1138
If anyone hasn't seen the Jeeves and Wooster series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry they're missing out
gizajob
I think about six months ago I commented on an AI thread to the effect of “I’m happy that after a 30 year effort and hundreds of billions spent, AskJeeves finally works as intended” - Jeeves is totally ripe for LLMing.
Completely baffling that after keeping ask.com going for this entire time (some two and a half decades of irrelevance) they shut it down at the point at which it can actually be made to work.
thom
There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!
NewJazz
Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.
harikb
The guy who bought friendster.com lurks here
IshKebab
Probably worth a fair bit more than $30k though.
undefined
DANmode
You have no idea how correct you are…
Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 as a natural language query model!
and until about 2000…some people preferred it!
Edit: and after that its indexing and results were clowned ruthlessly,
but that doesn’t change what I’m saying!
Morromist
It might be more correct to name the LLM Ask Gussie Fink-Nottle.
"Oh, dash it! I didn't mean to delete your project, I've been in such a dreadful funk today. So sorry."
disqard
I'm loving the Wodehouse references in this thread.
In case there are folks unaware of it, there is an excellent TV series called "Jeeves and Wooster" (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) -- highly recommended!
rickcarlino
I have felt the same way about defunct search engine HotBot
roryirvine
I'm not sure that LLM responses would be much improved by being rendered in eye-searing combinations of chartreuse and magenta...
elphinstone
It's a name best saved for an embodied humanobot that can do laundry, etc., too, as well as answer questions, screen calls, etc.
boudin
I always used to think ask jeeves was a malware because of the IE bar that was installed automatically with some app (java i think).
A fair amount of my teenage years was spent on uninstalling IE search bars (and other crap) from the computers of friends of my parents and ask jeeves was a massive pain to remove (had to remove dlls and registry entries manually as the uninstaller wasn't doing anything).
Because of that i wonder if most people outside of english speaking countries ignored there was a legit service behind this malware. I, for sure, never used it and always told people to not touch it based on how dodgy this search bar was.
So, because the time i wasted because of you and the number of computers you messed up by showing up uninvited, i say good ridance jeeves, i never liked you
SoftTalker
Even Oracle on windows would install an Ask toolbar in IE if you didn't untick the pre-selected checkbox in the installer. I always thought that was weird, for software that expensive to be including an IE toolbar for what, a few pennies more of revenue?
Clamchop
I remember most installers bundling such bullshit. It may have been so normalized that no one was sincerely asking if participating would harm their reputation.
I barely noticed as the practice went out of fashion but I'm so glad it did.
apexalpha
Dutch here... Most of my family kept having the Yahoo search bar in there for some reason.
Then it become Google, then something else that popped up.
The amount of time I've spent in my life fixing stuff on Microsoft "All binaries have full disk access by default" Windows is weird. It also mostly faded when people moved to locked-down smartphones.
I wonder if young people today could even comprehend what a dangerous shitshow Windows was pre 7.
SoftTalker
Any Windows release that was based on NT had the notion of users and administrators. It was just that in the default setup, the user account was also an administrator.
apexalpha
Since Vista they added a prompt, the UAC. But since they required it for almost anything people trained themselves to just hit Yes on everything.
cyode
“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.
domfletcher
Obligatory Wodehouse quote
"Jeeves, of course, is a gentleman’s gentlemen, not a butler, but if the call comes, he can buttle with the best of them."
buildsjets
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...
leke
Nice, I guess nobody is going to bother my Ask Alko side project now.
antonvs
Did he comply? Because it seems like that site would clearly have been covered by the protection for parody.
buildsjets
I’m not sure an unhealthy fascination with incest, underaged Catholic schoolgirls and see-thru mesh shirts constitutes an affirmative defense as parody. Also the whole thing was running on a university server, ‘twas simpler times.
undefined
oofbey
Nicely done
pailingems
[flagged]
lldb
It's mildly interesting that this landing page is hosted on github pages: https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com
tech234a
You can also see the various rejected wordings for the page in the commit history.
cube00
All the history is now gone and replaced with a single "Initial commit"
You can see view the history they've erased at and going back from https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/94cf10aa0152...
Including this interesting removed quote:
Search hasn’t been a strategic focus for IAC for some time and as user behavior shifted and the search landscape has become more complex, our search businesses have faced increasing challenges.
https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90dcae02ade5...
qingcharles
And now people submitting PRs :D
undefined
gandazgul
Wow thanks! I'll actually merge this lol
solomonb
Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.
w-ll
What a great game/mod on the og hl1
magic_hamster
Best comment I've read this week.
arm32
Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...
tptacek
Was it ever good?
stingraycharles
None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.
Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.
rsync
Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.
Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.
None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.
bsder
AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.
For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.
This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.
tptacek
I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.
stevekemp
I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].
bandrami
And at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.
helterskelter
Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.
cm2187
AltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.
kwoff
Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...
Mistletoe
Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.
> Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.
> Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.
gizajob
No not at all.
The whole point of AskJeeves was that you could ask Jeeves things in natural language because the landing page was a snappily dressed butler waiting to help you around the internet, but it didn’t really work so you were left disappointed every time. Still found myself using it because the url was easy to remember though. But then google annihilated it so nobody ever went back, and I guess why they dropped the Jeeves part of the url because he was less than useful.
bandrami
Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.
spike021
I very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.
bfsjjdjdfj
During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.
ryukoposting
It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.
serf
ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.
as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.
DANmode
WAS being given
They’re done.
mrweasel
Once in a while I stumple on sites like Ask.com, and I can't help wonder what it's like to work there.
At some point they may have outsource almost everything, but it's hard to imagine that they don't have a few IT on staff. What does these people do? Is it like working at a dying retailer out in the sticks and it's a little confusing when a customer actually works in?
gandazgul
I can tell you I still work there :) Its been an awesome job, startup feel but backed by a big public company. Ask.com was only a small part of the whole, we had 3000+ search brands. I worked with people who had been with Ask for 20+ years. I've been there for a decade and I'm still grieving about it shutting down.
ndiddy
What are they having you work on now that they’re shutting down search?
sm0olr
I worked for MapQuest in 2021 as an engineer. It’s pretty weird. I led a rebuild from Angular to React. Backend was all Scala. Really fun job and I worked with some excellent engineers. But the future, despite what leadership wanted us to think, was very clear in that it was a dying product with no real way back.
fudgeonastick
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.
jraph
https://perdu.com works very well for this. It also still answers to http.
Apparently it'll turn 30 years old in a few weeks [1]. It hasn't changed much if at all since its inception.
Its very small size makes it perfect for curl perdu.com or when the connection is very bad.
eresonance
Mine is https://www.red.com/
Been using that for so many years now, probably 20ish? Oh wow, yup, I remember this page from 2006:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060505141837/http://www.red.co...
NitpickLawyer
Yahoo.com should be your next one :)
arm32
I'd be willing to be ask.com will always resolve to a pingable IP address, that's a HOT domain name.
qingcharles
I've been using yahoo.com as my test domain since 1995...! I think I used microsoft.com before that, but yahoo is easier to type.
einsteinx2
Haha yep yahoo has been mine forever for the same reason stated by the OP
Barbing
Still feels like one big ad with an ad blocker. Not sure I’ll remember Perdu but that would be a nice fix. And maybe it connects to one domain instead of several.
tl;dr ya
dlivingston
I use https://www.example.com. I used to use Oprah.com; for some reason, that made me laugh.
LeoPanthera
I have a tiny bash script that picks four random common words from the list of the 10000 most common words on Wikipedia and tries to ping <word>.com for each.
It's quite rare to find an unregistered one.
qingcharles
I did this via some sort of bash + WHOIS call in about 1995 with the dictionary file I normally used for passwd cracking. There were a lot available then.
waynesonfire
Aol.com for me.
namegulf
You have a great and well known domain name, why not launch a GPT powered LLM on it?
It's a huge opportunity.
RomanHauksson
The page seems AI-generated, it has a few front-end Claudeisms:
- PlayFair Display and Inter as fonts
- Comments in the HTML for each section ("<!-- Main Content -->" and "<!-- The Logo -->")
- Bottom fade-in animation
- Tailwind (obviously a common choice for humans, but since it's an even more common choice for LLMs, it counts as evidence in favor)
cube00
Lots more AI-looking sections now removed in https://github.com/askmediagroup/ask.com/commit/90629dbe5ffb...
Anamon
I think that's fair for a static "end of service" notice which probably, almost by definition, won't be worked on further.
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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)