5mo ago

I can't believe we left him behind like that.

39 comments

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.
  
  The fact that Elon Musk is obsessed with Death Note is terrifying.
  
  Does it like animate responses or something?
- 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.
- 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.
  
  Ask cats?
  
  ask.com still exists
- 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

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.
- Why did you make me feel so old...
  ಠ_ಠ

You actually don't. Askjeeves.com is still there. Is it the same service run by the same people? I have no idea. But you can roll around in nostalgia all you like.
- It still exists but it's a content mill. Try a search and the results are all from domains they own.
- 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.
  
  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/
- Having to depend on it is the nostalgia, IMO.

Pretend I’m too young to know what this is. What is this? I’m assuming predecessor to Google?
- 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.
- I never really used the sure much myself, but if I recall correctly their while schtick was that you could just write out a question in plain English to search the web, as opposed to AltaVista and early days of Google where you would want to do a keyword search instead to get good results.
  But, then again, I never really used it so I could be misremembering things...
  ¯(ツ)/¯
- It was one of many search engines from before google became the default, yes.
- 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.
  
  I think Google was already around.
  No, Ask Jeeves existed before Google.

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.
  
  Yeah, it's like 5 websites now.

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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