Ask.com has closed
ask.com

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283 points

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supermdguy

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7 hours ago

149 comments

sanswork ・ 5 hours ago

For a long time ask.com had one of the only Google ad feeds allowing them to programatically request ads from Google to show on their search pages and for some reason instead of implementing it themselves they used a company I worked for to do it so for some time a lot of the ads on ask.com were actually google or yahoo ads running through a random ad server I wrote. I remember having to move our systems to make sure we were in a data centre as close as possible to them and Google/Yahoo since we had (I think?)50ms to receive a request from them, contact google and yahoo for ad inventory, merge them and return it to ask to show on the page.

(This was all like 15 years ago now)

  • cwnyth ・ 5 hours ago

    I'd love to see a write-up of this if you ever get the chance.

    • sanswork ・ 5 hours ago

      There really isn't too much more to it but happy to try and answer any specific questions. I wasn't involved in the business dealings at all so I have no clue why it happened. System was originally written in PHP and I later rewrote it in Erlang as we got more sources so I could contact all the networks for ads at the same time. It was a very lightweight system the click handler was the heavier one.

sixo ・ 7 hours ago

Missed opportunity to name an LLM "Jeeves" and finally live up to the vision.

  • johnzim ・ 5 hours ago

    One of the best improvements to my life was adding the following to my LLM Prompt: "Please respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories".

    Not only are the LLMs quite excellent at emulating the valet, the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well. Jeeves was always both perspicacious and enthusiastic about whatever task he was given - be it ironing a shirt or seeing to Bertie's continued wellbeing.

    • delis-thumbs-7e ・ 2 hours ago

      I’m building a private chatbot for myself so as not to be tripped every time Claude has an ”update”, andthis was one of the first things I implemented. With very strict system prompt of no sycophancy and calling me Sir, it works really well.

    • benrutter ・ 4 hours ago

      > the actual dynamic fits fascinatingly well.

      This is such a good pairing! Part of the fun of the stories is that its never clear whether Jeeves' suggestions are genuis, or overconfident but insane japes, I feel like this dynamic puts LLM hallucinations into a role where they're just part of the fun.

    • nomilk ・ 5 hours ago

      I feel dumb but I’d not previously made the Ask Jeeves and Jeeves from P.G. Wodehouse novels connection!

    • calgoo ・ 3 hours ago

      I use Marvin from the Star Force space opera book series. He loves sensors and information, and adds a level of challenge to counters the llm obsession with answering in over happy terms. I had Claude write me a character bible that I can include in projects to keep it consistent.

    • tigerlily ・ 4 hours ago

      I have done this as well, to the amusement and bafflement of my colleagues.

    • hnlmorg ・ 2 hours ago

      This is a genius idea and I’m going to shamelessly steal it!

      Thanks for sharing.

    • wyclif ・ 5 hours ago

      I feel this reply deeply. Tremendously depressed right now.

  • gizajob ・ 5 hours ago

    I think about six months ago I commented on an AI thread to the effect of “I’m happy that after a 30 year effort and hundreds of billions spent, AskJeeves finally works as intended” - Jeeves is totally ripe for LLMing.

    Completely baffling that after keeping ask.com going for this entire time (some two and a half decades of irrelevance) they shut it down at the point at which it can actually be made to work.

  • NewJazz ・ 6 hours ago

    Maybe this is a precursor to them selling the mark to someone who (at least thinks they) can capitalize on it.

    • harikb ・ 6 hours ago

      The guy who bought friendster.com lurks here

  • thom ・ 4 hours ago

    There was a period in the early 2000s where AskJeeves’ answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” was an old Eliezer Yudkowsky essay saying that because we weren’t smart enough to work out the meaning of life ourselves, our highest purpose was to build smarter AIs who might be able to answer definitively. Time to close the loop!

  • elphinstone ・ 5 hours ago

    It's a name best saved for an embodied humanobot that can do laundry, etc., too, as well as answer questions, screen calls, etc.

  • DANmode ・ 6 hours ago

    You have no idea how correct you are…

    Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 as a natural language query model!

    and until about 2000…some people preferred it!

    Edit: and after that its indexing and results were clowned ruthlessly,

    but that doesn’t change what I’m saying!

  • jerbearito ・ 5 hours ago

    WOW. 12 year old me would've loved this.

  • pailingems ・ 6 hours ago

    Two years ago I made a rudimentary chatbot/agent for our long running IRC channel using the OpenAI API as the "brain". Its nickname is Jeeves.

mbeavitt ・ 3 minutes ago

In 6 months we’re gonna see a HN thread: “I bought ask.com for £250k - here’s what I did with it”

cyode ・ 5 hours ago

“Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

This goes hard.

While he never married or had children, Jeeves is survived by his brother software butlers Jenkins and Alfred who have asked the public for privacy during this difficult time.

  • domfletcher ・ 3 hours ago

    Obligatory Wodehouse quote

    "Jeeves, of course, is a gentleman’s gentlemen, not a butler, but if the call comes, he can buttle with the best of them."

hyperbovine ・ 11 minutes ago

At Chabot Science Center there is still (and, presumably, will always be) the Ask Jeeves Planetarium. Makes you think about the transiency of it all.

solomonb ・ 6 hours ago

Man as a teenager I was in a Day of Defeat clan with a couple of the Ask Jeeves engineers. They were really cool.

  • w-ll ・ 5 hours ago

    What a great game/mod on the og hl1

mrweasel ・ 3 hours ago

Once in a while I stumple on sites like Ask.com, and I can't help wonder what it's like to work there.

At some point they may have outsource almost everything, but it's hard to imagine that they don't have a few IT on staff. What does these people do? Is it like working at a dying retailer out in the sticks and it's a little confusing when a customer actually works in?

arm32 ・ 7 hours ago

Sad what it had become: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316143530/https://www.ask.c...

  • tptacek ・ 7 hours ago

    Was it ever good?

    • stingraycharles ・ 6 hours ago

      None of the search engines from that era were really good. AltaVista was perhaps the best, but AskJeeves was up there and people used multiple. AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc. They all had their pros and cons.

      Then Google arrived and showed them what a “good” search engine was like.

      • rsync ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 9 more

        Altavista was fantastic and represented a features and usability high water mark that was never passed by google.

        Full boolean operator search with "literals" actually respected, negative search terms worked as advertised, etc.

        None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

        • thayne ・ 5 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          > None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

          My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.

          • stingraycharles ・ 5 hours ago

            Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.

        • mrandish ・ 5 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Agreed. AltaVista was the best of the pre-Google search engines. I seem to remember Google having negative terms, literals and booleans (at least or/and) - although they weren't well documented, they worked. Amazon had literals and negative terms too for many years. Now searching on both of those sites is "search theater", where they pretend to give targeted results while burying the result you're looking for just deep enough to maximize page views before too many users bounce.

          I fucking hate we now live in a world where leading companies A/B test precisely how much they can degrade their core product value and annoy users knowing they're safe from competitors because startups know if they threaten Google/Amazon on that stuff they'll just put back the minimum functionality long enough to ensure the new player dies.

          • akafred ・ 5 hours ago

            I pay for kagi on my personal machine, it is always a delight when my cmd-t search is answered kagi and not a list of ads ...

        • decimalenough ・ an hour ago

          Try Kagi, it implements them quite well.

        • seanmcdirmid ・ 6 hours ago

          I would think that 90% of the principals at DEC/Compaq WRL working on AltaVista would have moved to google, their first office was nearby in downtown Palo Alto back in 1999.

        • zorked ・ 3 hours ago

          It is absolutely insane to say that Altavista was better than Google though.

        • yread ・ 5 hours ago

          It worked pretty well on early google and altavista. Find an archive of searchlores.org from that era and see for yourself. +Fravia had documented and tested the features quite thoroughly

      • stevekemp ・ 4 hours ago

        I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].

      • bandrami ・ 6 hours ago

        And at the time it was still an open question whether search engines or curated oracles like Yahoo would be what stuck in the long term.

      • helterskelter ・ 6 hours ago

        Around this time you also had meta search engines, which gave you the dedup'd results of all the major search engines at the time. There was MetaCrawler and Dogpile from what I remember, both of which are oddly still around.

      • cm2187 ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        AltaVista and HotBot for me. Yahoo wasn't a search engine, it was a manually curated website directory (with a hierarchical structure), which was great for finding similar websites if you found one you liked.

        • eduction ・ 5 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          You could get search results on yahoo. The directory results would come first and then search results from their current “partner.” At one point it was Inktomi, the Berkeley company behind HotBot. At one point it was Google. Before them, one of the more generic ones.

          • hdgvhicv ・ 2 hours ago

            originally it was directory only, wasn’t until fairly late they adddd an alta vista fallback.

      • tptacek ・ 6 hours ago

        I remember AltaVista being the only really credible search engine prior to Google (I took a brief detour to Excite but kept going back to AltaVista). Jeeves I only remember for the freeform query gimmick.

      • bsder ・ 6 hours ago

        AltaVista had a Java applet that would visualize the "clusters" that a search produced. You could then click on a "cluster" in order to exclude all the irrelevant ones and the search results would update.

        For example: Searching on "python" would give you two obvious clusters one for "reptiles" and one for "programming languages". Clicking on the appropriate cluster would screen out all the irrelevant ones.

        This is a feature still unmatched by any search engine today.

      • bsimpson ・ 6 hours ago

        Don't forget WebCrawler!

      • thr0waway001 ・ 4 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Yahoo was pretty good until they removed comments from their posts as well as removing Yahoo Answers.

        I loved the chaos of Yahoo answers.

        I remember messed up questions like “Can humans get preggo from midgets” and things of that nature.

        • xnx ・ 4 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Gregnant?

      • iammrpayments ・ 4 hours ago

        I remember vividly how lycos was much better than google

      • kid64 ・ 4 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Nobody remembers Hotbot. Google before Google.

        • xnx ・ 4 hours ago

          I remember. Powered by Inktomi.

      • throwatdem12311 ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        And now every search engine has been flooded with SEO’d AI slop and they all suck again.

        • Zambyte ・ 42 minutes ago

          Kagi has done a good job of making it easy to cut through slop so far. I never really deal with slop search results

      • DeathArrow ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Alta Vista had more relevant search results than Google has now.

        • zombot ・ 5 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          For all practical purposes, internet search is dead or dying. It has been enshittified to perfection by multiple parties. Those who could have been called users in a previous life are the ones getting the least use out of it. For a brief period of time, LLMs can help. Until their inevitable decay into ad-infested hellscapes makes them just as useless. They don't have ad blockers.

          • Barbing ・ 3 hours ago

            You hear analysts talk about the majority of corporations being in the infancy of their understanding of language models. Shudder to think of the slop mature players will put out.

      • kwoff ・ 6 hours ago

        Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

    • bandrami ・ 6 hours ago

      Yes. When it came out it was amazing, and it forced the existing search engines to start parsing queries' intents rather than just searching for the words in them.

    • gizajob ・ 5 hours ago

      No not at all.

      The whole point of AskJeeves was that you could ask Jeeves things in natural language because the landing page was a snappily dressed butler waiting to help you around the internet, but it didn’t really work so you were left disappointed every time. Still found myself using it because the url was easy to remember though. But then google annihilated it so nobody ever went back, and I guess why they dropped the Jeeves part of the url because he was less than useful.

    • ryukoposting ・ 3 hours ago

      It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.

    • spike021 ・ 6 hours ago

      I very vaguely recall using it right before I started using google. very early 2000s. it was ok.

    • serf ・ 6 hours ago

      ask was cool because the appeal initially was to allow people to better form search queries with natural human language questions.

      as far as weird search engine traits I still think ChaCha is king; it's just sort of intrinsically funny that another human being is being given two cents to find me the most relevant FarScape fansite or DIY tattoo ink guides, whatever.

      • DANmode ・ 6 hours ago

        WAS being given

        They’re done.

    • tempaccount5050 ・ 6 hours ago

      I think that and dogpile were the best in that short area before google took off as the clear winner.

    • bfsjjdjdfj ・ 6 hours ago

      During those days you were switching between 3-4 different ones to find info. They were maybe good for two weeks where I would use it alot but you always switched around and came back to it.

    • Mistletoe ・ 6 hours ago

      Yeah I remember using it back in the day and getting good results.

      > Unlike early keyword-based engines, it aimed to answer specific questions, acting as a precursor to modern AI assistants like Siri or ChatGPT.

      > Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) was an early search engine launched in 1996 that allowed users to get answers via natural language queries, personified by a cartoon butler mascot. Developed by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, it focused on Q&A rather than just keywords.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

    • DANmode ・ 6 hours ago

      Between ‘97-2000, arguably.

namegulf ・ 6 hours ago

You have a great and well known domain name, why not launch a GPT powered LLM on it?

It's a huge opportunity.

firefoxd ・ 6 hours ago

Where do I buy it? Who wants to join me and buy it together?

jsweojtj ・ 6 hours ago

I want to know what was the first and last question asked of Jeeves.

petterroea ・ 2 hours ago

For anyone who hasn't used ask recently, ask.com was just showing results from websites ask themselves owned.

garganzol ・ 3 hours ago

They don't seem to serve ads on their farewell page. Such a lost opportunity.

  • hdgvhicv ・ 2 hours ago

    This is the attitude that killed the web. And kills pretty much everything it infects.

    • garganzol ・ 2 hours ago

      I agree, the message was a sarcasm.

radku ・ 41 minutes ago

Hope ask.com knowledge can be preserved in open source LLMs for future generations.

geoffbp ・ 34 minutes ago

People still use ask.com? Don’t know if I have for a long time

MrDrMcCoy ・ 3 hours ago

Anyone know who to contact for a possible open-sourcing of the old Teoma code? The world needs more search engines, and I vaguely remember it being reasonably good before it was bought and buried.

fudgeonastick ・ 6 hours ago

https://ask.com/ is my go-to site that I know will be up, but I know will not be in my DNS or browser cache. I use it as my "wait, is my internet really working" check.

I hope the domain lives on, and that I don't want to visit it.

  • jraph ・ 4 hours ago

    https://perdu.com works very well for this. It also still answers to http.

    Apparently it'll turn 30 years old in a few weeks [1]. It hasn't changed much if at all since its inception.

    Its very small size makes it perfect for curl perdu.com or when the connection is very bad.

    [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdu.com

  • NitpickLawyer ・ 6 hours ago

    Yahoo.com should be your next one :)

    • arm32 ・ 6 hours ago

      I'd be willing to be ask.com will always resolve to a pingable IP address, that's a HOT domain name.

    • qingcharles ・ 5 hours ago

      I've been using yahoo.com as my test domain since 1995...! I think I used microsoft.com before that, but yahoo is easier to type.

    • Barbing ・ 3 hours ago

      Still feels like one big ad with an ad blocker. Not sure I’ll remember Perdu but that would be a nice fix. And maybe it connects to one domain instead of several.

      tl;dr ya

  • LeoPanthera ・ 5 hours ago

    I have a tiny bash script that picks four random common words from the list of the 10000 most common words on Wikipedia and tries to ping <word>.com for each.

    It's quite rare to find an unregistered one.

    • qingcharles ・ 5 hours ago

      I did this via some sort of bash + WHOIS call in about 1995 with the dictionary file I normally used for passwd cracking. There were a lot available then.

randfur ・ 6 hours ago

No shoutout to P.G. Wodehouse for the IP?

  • gyan ・ 6 hours ago

    Yeah, what is the recognition of Jeeves/Wooster among the millennials?

    • jemmyw ・ 6 hours ago

      As a millennial, the TV show with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was played when I was a kid, and I've rewatched it several times as an adult and read a few of the books. Our kids have watched the show with us too. I'm currently trying to learn the theme on the piano.

      I'm sure it'll continue in some niche, much like Agatha Christie, where I've seen some recent youtube vids by younger people discovering how well they're written. I like it when they say "follows the old trope of ..." and then in the comments you get "doesn't follow it, invented it".

      • nephihaha ・ 44 minutes ago

        It's a very formulaic series, but it is fun. Possibly the best thing Stephen Fry ever did.

      • rhdunn ・ 6 hours ago

        There are a few YouTube "can I solve [story] before the reveal?" style videos focusing on Agatha Christie novels ranging from around 4 years old to today.

    • recursivecaveat ・ 3 hours ago

      I know what a Jeeves-style character is supposed to be like, but I couldn't tell you the origin, and I'd never heard of Wooster before just now.

    • duped ・ 6 hours ago

      I was in 4th grade in 2003 when I learned search engines existed (and I have a possibly tainted memory of our Computer Arts teacher in grade school explaining web crawlers and PageRank to us). We had a Gateway PC at home and AOL, but we weren't allowed to use anything networked (I only played Civ III).

      But we were essentially taught to use multiple search engines, but that was AskJeeves, Yahoo!, and Google. We liked AskJeeves because of the whimsy. Yahoo! felt too adult and Google felt too much like adults pretending to be kids.

MagicMoonlight ・ 34 minutes ago

It’s weird to close it right as chatbots are all the rage.

leke ・ 4 hours ago

I thought I remembered using this in the 90s when it was Ask Jeeves.

virgildotcodes ・ 3 hours ago

What a coincidence, I went to their website maybe 3 days ago, for the first time in maybe 15-20 years, after watching this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKWTfHNPn6k

I actually felt bad for them and wondered if this type of video poking fun at them would become a trend.

I can't help but think this may have influenced them to shutter to avoid more damage to the URL/brand value.

  • zelphirkalt ・ 2 hours ago

    For many people ask.com will remain an annoying bloatware shit, that slipped through on the last installation of something else they installed, only causing them more work in removing it again. I don't think there was much more damage to be done. Probably, on the same level as spammers, for most people.

chris_wot ・ 5 hours ago

No more ask.com toolbars being installed without asking.

Lorin ・ 7 hours ago

Would have been a great domain with the rise of AI, shocking they didn't adapt the persona.

justinator ・ 3 hours ago

Ironic that Ask Jeeves faked being an AI before AI completely overshadowed Ask Jeeves.

nephihaha ・ an hour ago

Ask Jeeves was pretty decent when it first came out, but at some stage the answers became more and more useless. I think this is probably a combination of so much junk being online, and also some kind of censoring/modification of the results. The latter may have been well meaning, but it meant that it became unusable.

Animats ・ 5 hours ago

Next, Yahoo Search? (It's still live.)

  • nephihaha ・ an hour ago

    I believe Yahoo now piggybacks off Bing.

    Like most search engines now, it mostly returns a limited range of results from "approved" sources.

colinb ・ 5 hours ago

I unexpectedly found myself working for the UK subsidiary of AJ just before the .com bubble pop. Interesting times. Things I remember:

  I wrote something to do cluster analysis of the previous day’s search queries. It turned out that the most frequent search was something like “naked picture of $soapOperaShowActor”. Actual search query data might shake your ideas of the goodness of people. 

 Much of AJ’s content was based on editorial staff (often young journalistic folk) researching what they thought might be the highest quality answer. One day I passed the desk of a colleague who was watching porn. What now? It turns out that they wanted to be able to answer the question “best porn of $kink” for a large variety of kinks. Which meant that they also had to have a policy of how to direct queries for CP. To something less harmful obvs.

 As a corollary of the above, the editors needed a way to search for candidate results. What did they use for this? Google of course!
Via an acquisition I worked for AJ in the US for about a year before the move to the UK. It was a vivid illustration of the way in which dishonesty and backbiting could permeate an org. I knew plenty of fine individuals there, some who kindly taught me hard lessons, but as a company, a culture, it was a cesspit.

Anyway I got laid off in the great wave of 2001, was out of work for a while, did some truly awful work on supermarket planogram s/w and eventually got a gig doing IP routing. Ever since then I’ve been patronising grad hires by telling them how useful it is to have a bad job in your past. It makes it much easier to cope with occasional bad days at an otherwise good place. “Sure, my code crashes on a double exception when the reverse bcopy chokes on an unwired chunk of address space in the ARP lookup interrupt path, but at least I’m not trying to optimise the positioning of cornflakes to take advantage is this month’s promo pricing”. Good god, there was a time when I had a subscription to The Grocer magazine. Watch out kids. This could happen to you! (I also got to spend a day following a guy around the London Underground as he refilled chocolate vending machines. But I won’t talk more about that unless you buy me a beer).

  • rwmj ・ 5 hours ago

    Did you know Chris ("Xris") Martin? I worked with him eons ago and then I think he went to AskJeeves around 2000-ish.

    • colinb ・ 4 hours ago

      Yes I did/do. He’s a top guy. I think he did some pretty spiffy work on multiprotocol routers in the 90s.

      • rwmj ・ 3 hours ago

        The multiprotocol QoS routing thing was what we worked together on back in '98-ish.

shevy-java ・ 5 hours ago

I don't think I have used ask.com in the past (perhaps many years ago though), but now I am becoming increasingly troubled here - does this mean we depend even more on google search? And it constantly gets worse too. That's concerning. We need some real alternatives that don't just suddenly vanish.

  • bxvvgd ・ 3 hours ago

    There are alternatives that dont depend on Google, like duckduckgo but the results are still not as good in more specific questions (in my experience)

abhinavsharma ・ 6 hours ago

Did they get a great deal for the domain from an AI lab?

xivzgrev ・ 6 hours ago

launched 26 years ahead of its time (LLMs)!

  • DANmode ・ 5 hours ago

    Small language model(s).

treelover ・ 5 hours ago

"Jeeves’ spirit endures"

It sure does.

sgammon ・ 6 hours ago

End of an era

booleandilemma ・ 5 hours ago

I was so young when I first used it and remember being delighted by the idea of phrasing a search query as a question. Google came later.

Thank you for being a positive part of the web of my childhood.

GalaxyNova ・ 5 hours ago

truly the end of an era

UltraSane ・ 6 hours ago

I wonder what it was like working for them.

  • bsimpson ・ 6 hours ago

    I only know them as a consumer, but IAC is truly one of the most scourge-of-the-earth companies. They're retreating to publish People Magazine now, but they monopolized concert tickets as Ticketmaster, and online dating as a rollup of every mainstream app in the last 20y. They also bought CollegeHumor and drove it into the ground/irrelevance.

    They're a terrible company. It's no surprise that AskJeeves failed, but society is better for it.

    • IG_Semmelweiss ・ 5 hours ago

      i believe they also bought vimeo and livestream.com, and proceeded to miss the boat where Youtube took off.

      • bonzini ・ 4 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Vimeo was bought by Bending Spoons.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

        • dchest ・ 3 hours ago

          That was after IAC:

          "Additional acquisitions in 2006 included ShoeBuy.com,[46] which the company later sold to Jet,[47] and Connected Ventures including CollegeHumor and Vimeo".

    • UltraSane ・ 4 hours ago

      It takes some real skill to destroy a site with as much talent as CollegeHumor had

  • paradoxyl ・ 6 hours ago

    as I recall, they hired writers and freelancers who put together broad articles that got pointed too when you asked a question, instead of trying to answer questions individually... but my memory could be off, that was 20 years ago.

avazhi ・ 5 hours ago

Been using the net for 26 years and I never once used that website. Or maybe I used it once and it was so dog shit that I thought it was just a spam website.

Wonder how much they’ll get for the domain name though.

  • nephihaha ・ an hour ago

    It was good when it started, but it has been useless for at least ten or fifteen years now.