Every great search must come to an end

General Discussion History
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For those of us who were around at the start of the internet, you may be sad to know that ask.com is finally closing it’s doors.

Got to admit thought it had done so years ago along with so many others and I have not used it for so long …

As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world’s questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026

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That is sad, I have used ask.com from time to time but I think AI is used more now!!

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Another AI casualty.
I guess it is the way of the world that new technology replaces old.
It is more than an AI side effect. If change were to stop happening what would the world be like?

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I felt the same when geocities closed it’s door and were taken by yahoo. Remember creating my first site back in 1994 for the society I was a member off,

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Even tho I haven’t used ask.com for years and years, it is still sad to see it go.

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Time IS change. We tell the time by counting recurrent events. If nothing changed there would be no Time.

We are saddened by particular events , not by the passing of time.

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The first websearch engine I used was “webcrawler” around 1995ish… Apparently still around - but whether it bears any legacy or inheritance from the original I don’t know :

But I also >>USED<< AltaVista (was a Digital Equipment Corp hosted product - running on a farm of DEC Alphas running DEC UNIX / Tru64 - each with a massive 4 GB of RAM [that was huge for 1996/1997!])…

And for less “legit” stuff - there was also AstaLaVista :smiley:

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Is that still around? I thought Netscape beat it.

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First web browser I can remember using.

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Sorry - I made a typo :

i.e. “USED” not “use”… I haven’t tried that search engine since the late 1990s - by 2000/2001 I was pretty much only using Google (when their motto was “don’t be evil”)…

Netscape did make a web server, and a proxy server - but - they were never in competition with Search Engines…

Netscape was a browser - developed mostly by Mark Andreesen (from his experience creating NCSA Mosaic) - and Netscape was open sourced and became Mozilla.

AltaVista was a search engine hosted and powered by Digital Equipment Corp - who were then bought out by Compaq who were then bought out by HP…

And I think the source code for NCSA Mosaic became Spyglass Mosaic and Microsoft bought it and it became Internet Explorer…

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