528
I can't believe we left him behind like that. (media.piefed.world)
submitted 1 day ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 38 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 85 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world 25 points 1 day ago

Maybe they were just too early, because apparently search tool "companions" are a thing now.

[-] andros_rex@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago

The fact that Elon Musk is obsessed with Death Note is terrifying.

[-] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 6 points 1 day ago

Does it like animate responses or something?

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world 18 points 1 day ago

I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's just an animated character for interacting with the Grok AI, except it's flirty and has "relationship building" mechanics... Probably not the little animal guy though, I hope.

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago

Like, what, you level up with it like a dating sim? I'm creeped out already, just the only things I can think of that melonball would do are even creepier.

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I'm not quite sure how structured it is or how far it goes, but I read that the romance-able ones will at least get more affectionate and change into skimpier clothes. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is just the beginning of this type of stuff. I remember seeing a clip of a man who had "fallen in love with" and "proposed" to his chatGPT girlfriend.

There are also already dedicated subreddits where people are building "boyfriends/girlfriends" with LLMs and getting attached.

[-] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 2 points 13 hours ago

Damn, they have a whole damn sub for this? Depressing...

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 points 17 hours ago

People are free to do as they wish and they aren't hurting anyone, but also yikes on bikes

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 13 points 22 hours ago

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.

[-] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 18 points 22 hours ago

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.

[-] javiwhite@feddit.uk 10 points 1 day ago

I wonder if they'd still be around had they pivoted to the internet's true purpose.

[-] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

ask.com still exists

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Ask cats?

[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

[-] sirico@feddit.uk 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Lycos has lived longer than 6 generations of dogs. Why did I make myself sad?

[-] grysbok@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 day ago

If it helps any, my (living) dog was born in 2008. That's only 14 years after Lycos was created.

[-] forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 day ago

Why did you make me feel so old...

ಠ_ಠ

[-] grte@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 day ago

It still exists but it's a content mill. Try a search and the results are all from domains they own.

[-] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 12 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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/

[-] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 8 points 1 day ago

Oh, Jesus. Yeah, that's bad.

[-] EvilEdgelord@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

Having to depend on it is the nostalgia, IMO.

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

Pretend I’m too young to know what this is. What is this? I’m assuming predecessor to Google?

[-] yucandu@lemmy.world 41 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] bamboo 18 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 9 points 23 hours ago

"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

[-] forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 1 day ago

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)_/¯

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world 6 points 1 day ago

It was one of many search engines from before google became the default, yes.

[-] jaybone@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

I don’t think predecessor. I think Google was already around. But it tried to be a competing search engine. And it sucked.

[-] darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 15 hours ago

I think Google was already around.

No, Ask Jeeves existed before Google.

[-] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago

I'm trying to remember if it sucked less than modern search. From memory it was easily worse.

[-] jballs@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago

I wanna click that Tour the Web link so bad

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world 17 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] jballs@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah, it's like 5 websites now.

this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
528 points (100.0% liked)

Microblog Memes

8817 readers
1455 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ReadyUser31@lemmy.world
aeronmelon@lemmy.world
needanke@feddit.org