Ask Jeeves, one of the first search engines, has shut down on Friday
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@campuscodi I suspect this is in preparation for selling the domain to an AI platform.
Amazing it lasted this long.
@campuscodi The idea of Ask Jeeves was that it would accept natural language queries, which was expected to be easier for internet noobs to compose back when the whole idea of internet and internet search was new.
In about 1999, the leadership of the academic CS department where I toiled directed me to create a knockoff site called AskHarlan that trolled our provost by accepting any input and always returning a variation of "no" because that provost was a hard sell. It didn't help.
@campuscodi It is a shame to see it go and not even in a good way. askjeeves.com still works but seems to be broken.
I have to admit I was more into Alta vista and dogpile. I'm kind of surprised dog pile is still around. It might be the only search engine around mostly in its original form.
I know Yahoo still does search but it's not in its original directory form or even a main part of their business if I had to guess.
@campuscodi
That sh!t was still running???
