Obit: A West Coast Digerati Deadpools Ask.com

Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You’d dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you’re just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the “West Coast elite” or “digerati” you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you’re dead. You’re about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon.

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