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If they buy Ask Jeeves, they'll be buying the one 'search engine' that's actually LESS useful then MSN search. Honestly, it's a poor man's Alltheweb metasearch, and the only interesting pre-defined question it's able to answer is Is Jeeves gay?

Lets ask Jeeves

"Explain this to me, I'm too lazy to run a few Google searches and educate myself." It's not as if the information on anti-spam techniques are difficult to find.

It appears you tend to respond "Ask Google" to a lot of Ask Slashdot articles. However, Google can't read your mind. Sometimes, the layman does not know the appropriate words to put into Google's query field in order to find relevant results. I myself have run into this problem. I'd ask Jeeves, but Jeeves doesn't seem to have much deep technical knowledge either.

Spam exists because it works

This means that one should approach reducing UCE by understanding how and why UCE works in order to attack those factors. This article seems to contribute to such an understanding.

Isn't this what AskJeeves strived to do from the beginning?

Interpret your question and hopefully give you a suitable answer... but it's not perfect yet.

Come to think of it, isn't that also what Clippit/Clippy tried to do, much to the world's chagrin?

Google says: Your search - "is the internet my source of knowledge?" - did not match any documents.

Well then, you should have asked Jeeves instead.

Um... Google, Ask Jeeves, and other major search engines have had image search capabilities for a while now. Just go to one of their sites, click on the menu tab for image search, then type in what you want to search for. Whether it's a celebrity, porn star, geographic location, tv show, or whatever, they'll usually have images of what you're looking for. MS is WAY behind the times here...

Ask.com would be goof for tutorials possibly, or even Wikipedia. Another good idea that has been mentioned, make a well organized clean(and simple! no fancy stuff, just the facts) website and get it on google and what not. Even sharing that text with the above links, along with letting the word out on related websites, and your information will reach it's audience.

...why dont they just Ask Jeeves?

who actually mixes them them the actual search results? NO ONE. no search engine of any size does this period. just because you say "they" do, and don't say who "they" are, doesnt make it true.

ok, ready?

i did this

and got this.

and for the fun of it i asked if jeeves was gay

ok, ready?

i did this

and got this.

and for the fun of it i asked if jeeves was gay

They still have it. I just found it by asking Jeeves "What do people ask Jeeves?" :)

http://www.ask.com/docs/peek/

According to the page it's updated every 30 seconds.

they do exactly that: they put computers against each other. and it typically doesn't take an hour, a microsecond, or the end of time. they usually abide by the same rules governing FIDE world championships. and yes, these tournaments typically result in the creation of better chess software.

look at the development of fritz, and deep junior, for example. or hell, why not try looking something up on google? it can't be that difficult, can it?

deep blue was dismantled after its rematch with kasparov. deep junior has been winning all the computer chess tournaments for the past three years.

The complete change in style, colors, and the company logo is obviously not enough.
(Question aimed at denmark): What about ask.com? They link you to other ppl's content, but framed in the ask.com frame with ask.com logos and links. Is this an infringement on those ppl's copyrights?

Surely somewhere, some marketing/sales agent is getting his wings over all the publicity this is generating for the European newspaper.

Banner ads are still done wrong on a lot of sites. The problem is they are too often arranged to be paid based on the number of times clicked, and ignore payment based on impression. Impression is how ads work in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. But on the web, many advertisers saw the possibility of interactive clicking and just assumed a consumer would click on the ad whenever they wanted to find out more. Just notice how many ads don't really tell you in the ad what company or even what product/service is involved.

Unlike most of the other media, web users often tend to be motivated for other goals at the moment the ad is impressed. For example when visiting a portal like Ask Jeeves, they have something on their mind they are looking for. The ad is just a diversion and they are unlikely to go there.

But ... ad impressions still work. They just have a latent psychological effect that builds up over time. Seeing the ad once, if its something you are really interested in, might get you over to that site ... later on today. Or it might even get you to buy that product ... later on this week. And if it's something you have no interest in at all, when you see that ad (best if it's not intrusive which would make it negative) many many times, you build up "brand awareness". Later, maybe many months later, when you do have a need for that product or service, or happen to be talking with someone who does, then the brand name comes up. When shopping for that kind of product and you see several choices on the store shelves, you're more inclined to pick the brand that was more advertised just because it now seems to be the more familiar brand ... and you never even visited their web site.

If you like fast food and McDonalds adds a new product to their lineup which you might like, the banner ad for it might clue you in to this wonderful new treat. But are you likely to visit their web site? A few people might. Most won't. Are you likely to pull in the next time you're driving down the street while hungry on your lunch break? Very likely.

Too many web site operators think they have to be paid for advertising based on click throughs. That's just wrong, and it needs to change for web advertising to survive (the interactivity goals based on ads was never a realistic concept).

Too many businesses in product areas, especially consumer, where there is no real value of a web site to their product (fast food, small appliances, groceries, clothing, etc) are just not advertising on the web at all because they know people won't click on the ads to visit their site (no obvious value to it). What they are missing is that the impression model still works ... or that they are afraid of advertising based on impressions because of some difficulties in accounting and auditing (mostly because its still too click-through oriented and these problems are not yet well solved).

Impression ads, of course, have to be cheaper per impression than a click-through. And this won't rule out still having click-through ads. While writing this comment the Think Geek ad for Bawls is blinking away at me. I'm not going to be visiting because I have no interest today. But if next month I happen to have an interest in it, I know where to go get it. That's latent response impression advertising. But it only works when the ad makes it clear where to go (domain names help if it's an online place to go). And it only works if the web site is going to get paid even if no one ever clicks on the ad.

Does micheal sims like goatse.cx?

Ask Jeeves also posted year-end search trends, but it picked different information to highlight than either Lycos or Google.

Yearly: frequent searches, news-related searches, health, CEO scandals, music artists, vacation destinations, products and brands.

For each of the top 5 news stories, the year-end page includes several popular questions related to the news. For example:

2. September 11th Memorial
-- How many people died on September 11, 2001?
-- Is 9-11 a holiday?
-- What events are taking place on September 11, 2002?

Weekly: frequent searches, general advancing queries, movies, and news.

Some of the advancing queries are questions ("What is Kwanzaa?") and some are searches ("Saint Nicholas"), but I don't know whether that difference reflects actual differences in the way people search on aj.com for different types of information.

Judging by the responses to this post (or rather the lack thereof), NLP is not a very hot topic. Most of natural language processing research is in a very academic stage. Quite some universities study some NLP related small little subtopic, but there are hardly any real large departments - say the size of a computer science faculty.

With Lernhout & Hauspie - the one major commercial software supplier in this field - gone bankrupt, there are only some small companies, trying to get by. Some have success in a very specialized sub-subject, like OCR, voice response or information retrieval.

As a former Computational Linguistics student, I'd say the main problem is either the lack of computational power or the lack of manual labour. Ie.: even a very well defined liguistic area needs to be defined with too many rules (in a complex system) or needs too much data and CPU time (in a brute force) to be feaible, commercially viable, interesting in the Turing-sense... too much effort to just make it work.

Where you'd expect high-level NLP to work, simpler techniques usually work better. Ask Jeeves and Q-go are great, but most people agree no search engine currently beats Google, even when it's taylored for a very small subject. NLP is just way immature, compared to most other computational topics - primarily because it is intrinsically complicated.

I guess we'll have to wait for the killer-app for another decenium or two, though I'm a pessimist. Until that time I'd agree all institutions to collaborate as much as possible, and I really don't understand where some universities are going with their closed source research projects.

--
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive

I go to the one source that has all the answers: Ask Jeeves

But you (as a whole) wanted them to come working in the US, you have to deal with the consequences...

[stuff removed]

You have also to keep in mind that the US wanted these workers to come. They came, they worked, they paid taxes, now they bother you.

First, at its peak, they allowed 200,000 H1-Bs in the country, before that and after that, it was more around 60K. The US population is like 288,000,000 people [census.gov] so we're talking here less than 1% of the US population.

Here is the answer...

Now it comes up with a page that says "Actually, I prefer the term jovial."

Well, why don't you ask jeeves? I did. Here's his response.

will I ever find true love?
drink me?
Who's on first?
Is Jeeves well hung?
how are you?
what is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
is Jeeves stupid?
what is the best search engine?
f*** you?
why do I never see baby pigeons?

find him here.

on what people are asking. ./'ed?

most amusing.

Nothing like learning about:
- Anal Fisting
- butt-fucking.

Jeeves, for the fact that you say you aren't gay, you have a lot of knowledge on the subject.

Nothing like learning about:
- Anal Fisting
- butt-fucking.

Jeeves, for the fact that you say you aren't gay, you have a lot of knowledge on the subject.

Nothing like learning about:
- Anal Fisting
- butt-fucking.

Jeeves, for the fact that you say you aren't gay, you have a lot of knowledge on the subject.

Is Jeeves Gay?
Will You F*** Me?

BTW: The "Is Jeeves Well Hung" no longer seems to be working.

Is Jeeves Gay?
Will You F*** Me?

BTW: The "Is Jeeves Well Hung" no longer seems to be working.

Go on to http://www.ask.com and ask Jeeves if he's gay :-)

This used to result in a funny error message something like:

"Server Error 505 - None of your business".

I think that if we start teching are kids at a young age in school about the wonders of atoms and subatomic particles that we would have more smart people that can help with major breathroughs in the field. If we have more people in one area then we can tackle problems very quickly. Like get 1 million nanotechnology proffesional one very critical problem that is made of lots of problems but still has one ultimate goal. For example have all of them work on nanobot's. Once we get them then we can build more specilized teams and break them up into sub thinktanks. Basically give more grants and let more people know about nanotechnology. Make atom realated topics a daily part of your life and tell everyone about what you know. We all know nanotechnology will solve about every problem we as a race have and our planet has. So why not invest more now and train more people. Forget about money. The USA has plenty of funny money. The USA is in debt $6,121,692,487,637.44 as of 08/07/02 at 8:15:15 A.M. GMT. Check out the current debt here. A lot of people think give it time and we will have more break throughs. I think though if we are that much in debt then why not through more debt money at nanotechnology. When we make a couple of breack throughs sooner then it's finances now then we can pay off the debt without a problem and turn the usa into a money making government then we will be more powerful and money will not be an issue because we can just make whatever we want out of sand or whatever cheap easy to use aboudend substance we can use. It's just my opinion that we can make thinks happen a lot faster then they are now. Give nanotechnology a trillion or more dollars of funding. The pay off is so good that we should not even be thinking about the money. Think about mankind and how many things we can solve that will make all of our lives better. We have the powor\people\money to do it now so why don't we.Good article on what nanotechnology is.

didn't bother will spell check or grammer. Screw it, hehe.

i went there and i wanted to see their privacy policy before i used the engine, but i had to actually use their search engine before able to see a link, this was after the site had tried to place 2 cookies on my system,
one from teoma and one from a 1x1 gif webbug from askcm.com, after performing a search the webbug transmitted what i had searched for and a GUID to the askcm.com address as well in the form of a hash.
nearly every way of tracking your behaviour has been implemented on their site.

Of course it does finaly provide (after using) it mentions they will take if they can personally identifying info and they share it with 3rd partys (with permission) (yeah right like yahoo/hotmail did)

On using Internet Explorers "privacy report" feature (which uses the webstandards w3c p3p privacy method) it came up as not supporting that either

pretty un-professional if i cant view a privacy policy before using their service, isnt that what its for ?

not that google is any different of course as it too doesnt support the w3c privacy standard and tries to set a cookie, but it doesnt use webbugs to thirdparty sites and set 2 cookies so i guess thats an improvement.

Looking at the toolbar they offer i have to agree to the the same terms as their website!, which seems strange as they expect me to install software without a explanation of what its gonna do to my system (spyware anyone ?).

Teoma (ask) is yet another classic venture of YOU are the product not the search engine so selling you to the highest bidder takes more importance than the technology ever will.

• Teoma's toolbar does not have a "Search Site" button.
  
• Google adds "Google Search" to Internet Explorer's context menu for selected text. Teoma does not. (This feature is built into Mozilla, by the way.)
  
• Shift+Enter doesn't open the search results in a new window like it does in the Google Toolbar.
  
• Alt+Enter doesn't go straight to the first hit like it does in the Google Toolbar (I'm Feeling Lucky).
  
• Alt+D (focus address bar) and Alt+G (focus Google toolbar) do not work while the Teoma toolbar has focus. Furthermore, CLICKING on the Google toolbar does not work when the Teoma toolbar has focus.

• Neither Google nor Teoma makes their toolbar Search button search for selected text. (Same with the search buttons built into IE and Mozilla.) You can drag the selection into the search textbox, but that's awkward.
  
• Clicking search brings you to a page with a search box but does not focus the search box for you. In contrast, the front page for each search engine focuses the search box automatically, saving you a mouse click.
  
• Pasted Japanese text comes out as a bunch of question marks, and clicking search actually searches for question marks (%3f).
  
• The only version available is for Internet Explorer for Windows.

That's something like Ask Jeeves.

Recently, however, I was able to train my secretary (I'm a senior level manager for a fortune-50 company) to use askjeeves.com to research coffee making tips (I didn't hire her for her coffee making skills!). Unfortunately, shw discovered the "shop" button, so I had to discontinue the experiment.

If you read the article, it states that the ask.com site is already using the tech they are planning to roll out tomorrow on teoma.com.

To test it, I did a search for something I'm actually looking for right now:
"italian hand painted ceramics"
for my friend's wedding present.

Comparing the results from ask and google, it seems to me that ask actually provides higher-quality results (for this search at least).

This is a real change, since I've until now thought that ask jeeves was a company with really bad tech (I had several meetings with their founder and 'chief scientist' and other lead team members back in the day and found them completely clueless. No, really, you cannot imagine how clueless... AND they were NT based!), and I was always shocked at how successful they managed to be.

Now it looks like they've purchased something that really works.

Rather reminds me of when Macromedia looked like they were about to go bust (no one cared about Director any more) and they managed to purchase Flash...

It's funny that Teoma has trouble defining its own identity. So, are you guys a search engine or a gambling casino? At least the users get to pick what they like most.

I wish them best of luck. Google is good now. What is to keep it from selling out like Yahoo is doing now? Competition is good. Now, I wish Teoma had a news archive.

It's funny that Teoma has trouble defining its own identity. So, are you guys a search engine or a gambling casino? At least the users get to pick what they like most.

I wish them best of luck. Google is good now. What is to keep it from selling out like Yahoo is doing now? Competition is good. Now, I wish Teoma had a news archive.

I wrote the above, but I don't understand the mod.

Asking Jeeves the question posed by the OP ["Did ask.com buy out teoma?"] would have been funny. If only because it prominently returns this helpful link:

Where can I learn about Ask Jeeves' acquisition of Teoma Technologies?

This result might also be viewed as funny, in that it partly refutes this claim that Ask Jeeves is considered by most an "inferior search engine." Looks to me like it can handle hasty questions from five-digit Slashbots just fine.

I wrote the above, but I don't understand the mod.

Asking Jeeves the question posed by the OP ["Did ask.com buy out teoma?"] would have been funny. If only because it prominently returns this helpful link:

Where can I learn about Ask Jeeves' acquisition of Teoma Technologies?

This result might also be viewed as funny, in that it partly refutes this claim that Ask Jeeves is considered by most an "inferior search engine." Looks to me like it can handle hasty questions from five-digit Slashbots just fine.

I wrote the above, but I don't understand the mod.

Asking Jeeves the question posed by the OP ["Did ask.com buy out teoma?"] would have been funny. If only because it prominently returns this helpful link:

Where can I learn about Ask Jeeves' acquisition of Teoma Technologies?

This result might also be viewed as funny, in that it partly refutes this claim that Ask Jeeves is considered by most an "inferior search engine." Looks to me like it can handle hasty questions from five-digit Slashbots just fine.

Did ask.com buy out teoma?

It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.

The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:

"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."

You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.

Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?

Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)

I'm astonished. I use google for generic searches, but any time I need a specific answer, google is the one I definitely would not use, as it never returns the link I want in the first 3 pages.

So I have a list of twenty-something search engines I use for specific purposes as they all have their sweet spot.

Here are my top 7:

ask.com
altavista.com
findlaw.com
lycos.com
metacrawler.com
alexa.com
alltheweb.com
etc etc

I wonder if the nice people at Ask Jeeves are going to mind having their (presumably trademarked) logo swiped for this?

Looks like guppi is a Graping program... accourding to this search at ask.com

From what i gather hear.. its the same as graphing! :)

UTF-8 encoding:

UTF-8 is an efficient encoding of Unicode character-strings that recognizes the fact that the majority of text-based communications are in ASCII, and it therefore optimizes the encoding of these characters. ... See also RFC2044 for details.

It IS unicode.

WRONG! There is a McDonald's at Hanoi Square!

Proof, I'll give you PROOF! Or even MORE PROOF!

I hate to be a link whore, but i didnt understand very clearly what multicast basically is. These helped me a bit.

AskJeeves Here

MentorTech (PDF)

Bob Stein (boatload of good links at the bottom)

Just ask jeeves... Duh.