Ask Jeeves had real potential in the AI era -- a character you could actually recognise, which could be moulded to fit the character from the books (the training material is more than adequate for a persona). Current AI chatbots used for searches have either no real personality or a very simplistic sycophant one. A detailed persona that could keep people engaged and interested without talking them into paranoia or suicide would likely have gone down well.
Regarding ancient search engines, both webcrawler.com and lycos.com still exist and are functional. These both slightly predate Ask Jeeves. Interestingly, webcrawler.com still works with the Lynx browser.
Sunsetting?!?!?!? How can dial-up still be a thing? Even the slowest tethered smartphone speed is going to be at least 10x and likely more than 100x faster than dial-up.
When Ask Jeeves came out, it was new and revolutionary. But they just sat there, failing to continue the long road of improvements that were inevitably needed.
At the same time, Google beat them at their own game. Google made it possible to search using the very same Q&A syntax that Ask Jeeves pioneered, but Google did it better.
Finally, Ask Jeeves became a junk site, little more than a place for banner ads.
That's Stephen Fry , isn't it?
Ask Jeeves had real potential in the AI era -- a character you could actually recognise, which could be moulded to fit the character from the books (the training material is more than adequate for a persona). Current AI chatbots used for searches have either no real personality or a very simplistic sycophant one. A detailed persona that could keep people engaged and interested without talking them into paranoia or suicide would likely have gone down well.
AIM and AOL dial-up services also sunsetting
Sunsetting?!?!?!? How can dial-up still be a thing? Even the slowest tethered smartphone speed is going to be at least 10x and likely more than 100x faster than dial-up.
When Ask Jeeves came out, it was new and revolutionary. But they just sat there, failing to continue the long road of improvements that were inevitably needed.
At the same time, Google beat them at their own game. Google made it possible to search using the very same Q&A syntax that Ask Jeeves pioneered, but Google did it better.
Finally, Ask Jeeves became a junk site, little more than a place for banner ads.
So long AJ, it was nice knowing you.