Haven’t used it in years but this legitimately makes me sad for some reason.
It wasn’t very PC, but you could ask Jeeves if he’s gay and get a snarky reply.
Here’s a bit of trivia (I worked for a startup that Ask Jeeves acquired back in 2000 & stayed on for a few more years):
There was a brief period of time where Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into search for porn. They went so far as to design a French maid caricature named Mimi that was to parallel the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. They even registered a bunch of domains like askmimi.com before finally deciding they didn’t want to risk damaging the Jeeves brand, and scratched the whole project.
Another bit of trivia: the CEO & executives at Jeeves when they acquired us were short-sighted idiots. One of the products my startup had developed was something we called “text ads” that let people bid on popular search terms for placement of ads along with the search results we served up. It was a fully automated system that required virtually no interaction on our part, and we considered it a license to print money. It brought in a good amount of revenue for us. After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.
The company that bought it made some improvements to it then re-launched it as Google AdWords, and Google quickly eclipsed Jeeves after that.
After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.
Wow. They really did die the hero instead of living long enough to become the villain.
They may be idiots, but they’re respectable idiots.
I imagine even if they tried to make a run with the ads, different people who were sociopathic would have still gained the monopoly.
The building of that monopoly required criminal minds
That is amazingly myopic wow
Can only imagine what the IP will be used for now
Use our new shiny Ask AI agent! Trained on double the stolen training data!
Just as soon not, as any connection to it will be tracked and forwarded to ice and homeland security
I didn’t even realise Jeeves was still around! I remember using it in school before google existed.
altavista, lycos, infoseek, ask jeeves… i feel old.
You’d think someone wasting money on AI would have snapped up this property. The brand is still a good fit for a chatbot.
Especially if they had it answer you like it was the head butler on Downton Abbey or something!
It’s good to see they never sold out to some AI chatbot nonsense. Shame to see it go.
I expect the trademark will be for sale soon.
And that’s when it becomes AI slop?
Not that Jeeves was a very good search engine to begin with. But it’s a good way to ruin nostalgia and disrespect the past.
Facedeer’s just trolling as usual.
The truth of the matter is: we’re at the peak of AI innovation and subsidies, and if any company could demonstrate profitability by incorporating a modern LLM, this would have been it. And they didn’t.
Your obsession with me is quite silly. I recommend you just block me already, then you won’t have to see my “trolling.”
Would you like to engage with everything else I said, or was your sole contribution to say “haha AI soon”
PG Wodehouse would die again if he saw Jeeves become a digital effigy
It’s not about making money from his creation. He did that already. He would hate seeing Jeeves become a hollow shell of acquiescence instead of the cunning intermediary he was.
It was a garbage search engine, but a memorable one from the early web nonetheless.
Yeah, I remember disliking it back in the day (Alta Vista gang!!!🅰️♈), but I wish they evolved and got better rather than shutting down and I am still sad to see it go.
Dogpile.com was the best 😉
Used to see about a few dozen, and now some of them like Yahoo and Excite survive mostly in Japan.
Have to note that Excite has a very interesting history, asides from its domain name bought by, of course, Ask.
Another relic from '95 is still managing to keep a web presence.
Owned by these folks; https://system1.com/what-we-do
That used to be my search page of choice.
It was the best option until the page-rank algo came out.
Was good for a few years, but then started to get its ads intrusive as the enshittification started to creep in.
o7
wait that was still up? crazy
It was in the top 10 most visited websites for a surprisingly long time.
As an Android user, I’ve been disappointed that they’ve never had a British male accent, at least in the US. I would be rather entertained to have my voice assistant respond like a polite but mildly annoyed butler.
Surprised it didn’t get a AI makeover
*pleasantly surprised.
Ask Jeeves was a remnant from a bygone time of static html 4.0 pages, <blink> tags, and view counters. It was a simpler time, perhaps even a better time. But I’m glad this memory didn’t have to get tarnished, with the mid 2020s tech du jour.
I used a Visitor Counter to beat a business rival who had stolen my business (long story, but he was a crook). Since it was a small town, and this guy was well connected, with a brother on the police force, so I got nowhere with real justice. This was this guy’s business model - invest in a business, then steal it.
So I told my story on my web page, and put a hit counter at the bottom. First, he threatened to sue me, and I told him to bring it on, I had written documentation and many live witnesses who would verify every statement I made.
The page went locally viral, and people all over town told me they read the page. As the hit counter imcreased, his business decreased. He got increasingly desperate as his business crashed, begged me to take it down, which I refused, and eventually he closed the business.
I re-branded under another name, and continue to operate that business to this day.
I remember it being my first search engine after seeing a tv ad for it in the 90s.
Never thought about it for about 20 years but a little sad nonetheless.
Oh my god!
They killed Jeeves!
you bastards!
Honestly, I forgot this site existed.
