this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Pretend I’m too young to know what this is. What is this? I’m assuming predecessor to Google?
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.
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.
"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
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)_/¯
It was one of many search engines from before google became the default, yes.
I don’t think predecessor. I think Google was already around. But it tried to be a competing search engine. And it sucked.
I'm trying to remember if it sucked less than modern search. From memory it was easily worse.
No, Ask Jeeves existed before Google.