iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

John Self @john-self.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Perfectly ironic given Ask Jeeves’s USP when it launched was that you could (kind of) use natural language questions, and now that’s what AI search is all about.

The old internet@theoldinternet.bsky.social

Ask Jeeves has officially shut down on May 1, 2026, ending its 25-year run

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John Lister - johnlisterwriting.com @johnlister.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

IIRC, in the very early days the "natural language" worked because they literally sat down and thought of all the questions people might ask and then wrote a results list to match that question. This proved... unscalable. (Still better than AltaVista trying to make a complete directory of the web.)

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Jamie @jimdub.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I feel this way about a few things at the moment: oh well done chaps, you seem to have reinvented the concepts of 'search' and 'browse', except far less reliable 🤦‍♂️

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