Ask have been involved in some desperate stuff
I've been seeing forum backlink spam coming in from Ask on some blogs I administer.
Poor show from these lads and I had a soft spot for both them and Excite from the "old days"
Ask.com has quit the internet search biz and is laying off around 130 engineers. It will no longer attempt to compete with Google’s might and will instead fix its efforts on finding answers to questions via search requests. Ask.com, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, is cutting back its total workforce of about 400 people …
Don't you mean before Yahoo got hold of it? HotBot never had their own search system, they were just a front-end for the Inktomi search engine. Inktomi was bought out by Yahoo back in 2002, and for years it powered Yahoo's search results.
It tells you a lot about Yahoo's management and engineers. They bought out three separate search engine systems over the years: Inktomi, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb. Result: they killed them all.
Did Ask.com not own the patent to the page preview thing that Google is subjecting it's users to?
Also, last time I installed a freeware app it was a Yahoo toolbar that it wanted to pollute my hard drive with.
They died ages ago, they couldn't decide on a USP, then killed off Jeeves, then brought back Jeeves.
Bring back altavista.digital.com !
The ASK search brand/url must be worth something (negative connotations with toolbars excepted)
Googles biggest fail at the moment (despite what some might have yout think) is that it's search results are getting worse and worse for any sort of 'hard' search. It's currently only fast for shopping and finding the correct page in Wikipedia or your local council's website..
But if you have a specific question; maybe a error message you want to research, or need to find a 'howto' for some specific task.. If so prepare for a session since their index is so badly polluted by SEO, aggregation sites, autowritten capture pages and forums full of idjeets that it can take 15 minutes of search refinement for the real info to appear above the chaff..
I think there's an opening for a SEO -unfriendly- search engine out there.. One that proudly and actively fights the spammers and scammers; and if you want to build it the ASK brand would be a good starting platform.
I hear ya Zolko, could not agree more, and @Charles Calthrop you too, the G company is just exploiting a failing in an already stupid technology. But the mob follows where the TV says to go.....hmm, which is interesting, considering TV is about to die.
But I digest. Ask was fine, all the stuff about it being slow an not comprehensive was just spin from G.
Your search results handed me so much infections that I even used a host file to keep your entire network away from my pc.
It was realyl disturbing when I found freee software also asking me to isntall the ask toolbar which would auto infect my newly installed OS.
I will not mis ASK at all.