Did you ever Ask Jeeves?

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

Did you ever Ask Jeeves?

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@jalefkowit I was on tenterhooks.

[andycarolan@social.lol]

@neil better than anything we have now

[noondlyt@hellions.cloud]

@neil

Jeeves knew its place.

[megalomaniac@mastodon.me.uk]

@neil ah, but did you Altavista?

[dakkar@s.thenautilus.net]

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I worked for them!

[sherifflonestar@mastodon.social]

@neil I was an Alta Vista man myself.

[derickr@phpc.social]

@megalomaniac @neil Yes. I know one of their original techies too.

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@neil

while I tried it on more than one occasion, it almost never produced useful answers. very much like modern LLM results in search-engines. If it's something simple and factual like "What's the capital of Morocco?" or "What's the current population of Texas?" it can usually succeed. But that deeply technical question? right out.

[u0421793@toot.pikopublish.ing]

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I told Jeeves

[annehargreaves@ioc.exchange]

@megalomaniac @neil yep

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@megalomaniac I did indeed!

[highlandlawyer@mastodon.social]

@megalomaniac @neil
DejaNews

[aizuchi@hachyderm.io]

@neil did you ever go down the decision tree of Yahoo’s front page, pre-web crawlers?

[tig@mastodon.org.uk]

@neil nope because at the time Lycos has a beta site that was just the search engine and didn't try to be a portal and was very similar to what would become Google (as in binning the portal crap) and was so much faster

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@aizuchi Hmm... I don't remember that!

[witewulf@cyberplace.social]

@neil yes, but I was thinking about Evil Jeeves

[seindal@mastodon.uno]

@aizuchi @neil

Or fight with fierce DMoz editors about the listing of your website in an obscure regional category

[meercat0@mastodon.social]

@megalomaniac oh yes. At some point I thought altavista was much better and google was a pointless attempt to dethrone it

[meercat0@mastodon.social]

@neil heard of him but never asked him anything. Was an altavista fan myself