Not too long ago, services like GOOG-411, 118 118 and AQA used actual humans to answer questions with witty responses and encyclopedic knowledge. Today’s search engines could learn something.
  • Matengor@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    6 months ago

    I didn’t even know about these services. It’s fascinating they were relevant for about ten years only. What a good read.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        6 months ago

        I remember texting chacha if every rose has its thorn, to which they would respond that according to the 1988 song released by Poison, every rose does have its thorn.

        I can’t remember so many things from that part of my life, why that stuck, no idea.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      I had heard of them but had no idea there were so many of them or that they were so successful

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Wonder if there a way bring any of these types of services back and be affordable? Like the part of chatting with older people. There are lots of old people in this world who would love to have some to talk with.

      • erwan@lemmy.mlEnglish
        9·
        6 months ago

        GOOG-411 was created specifically for Google to gather voice samples, with different ages, accents, etc. to train voice recognition. It was never for the sake of providing a service.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” back then. They had a staff of human editors who curated answers to popular questions. Nothing they answered back then was done via search.

        Source: I worked for a search engine startup in the 90’s that was acquired by Ask Jeeves when they realized they needed a true search technology since human editing wasn’t scalable.