Well I never...
"Company pulls allegedly popular cartoony figurehead to self-proclaimed brouhaha only to reinstate it a year or two later, claiming 'our customers demanded it/him/her came back!'"
PR puff by numbers.
Ask.com has gone back to the future, unveiling a public beta version of a major redesign that returns the site to its days as a butler that answered your questions. But this being the age of "social media," the IAC-owned company has added a new twist to its old question-and-answer setup. In addition to using automated …
ask.com? Creators of the ask.com toolbar?
Google (snigger) it. Not one redeeming feature, everyone hates it, and many go on to say that ask.com is useless anyway.
The toolbar is bundled with a variety of software (any way to make a buck regardless of how much we piss of our users), and in many of those cases is NOT opt-out. It is forceibly installed regardless of what the user clicks.
I learned to hate it a while back after finding MANY google returns to queries, coming from ask.com that were entirely, completely useless.
If they think they can improve this with their newfangled Jeeves, then good luck to them. I on the other hand have given up a long time ago.
I guess this is why I now get a completely blank screen from ask on Firefox with NoScript?
Shame. It was my 1st choice search engine because of Ask Eraser. Ask nearly lost that status when they made all their sponsored ads clickboxes. That is really annoying because you click what looks like blank space to put focus back onto firefox and wham you've clicked through.
Now they've made it totally useless without giving them script permission it's time to say buh bye. I'm going to have to move on to something else. Not google obviously, think untrustworthy raised to the power of unscrupulous.