CSotD: Ask me if I still care
Skip to comments
Reality Check, with a reminder of those left behind.
Sigh. Poor Jeeves indeed.
I never asked Jeeves much of anything because poorly constructed inquiries tend to send you off into the hinterlands, and it seemed to me that purposely making inquiries in "plain language" was an invitation to start in those hinterlands and then spiral your way outward.
Jeeves is long gone from the US, though he's back fielding questions in the UK, where he blinks, which is my criterion for great on-line graphics.
In this country, he has morphed from Ask Jeeves to just Ask.com, which is one of those annoying sites that build traffic by finding out what people want to know and then either paying freelancers five bucks to write an incomplete and unreliable answer or simply compiling the answers of whatever experts are willing to volunteer their knowledge on the topic.
Making the world less intelligent, one misdirected inquiry at a time.
Speaking of ancient search engines, I just looked and, much to my surprise, hotbot is still there, in a new design, copyright 2012 by Lycos and this is probably where some tech fan steps in and says, well, yeah, it's there but it's just channeling Google. Or that Google is just channeling hotbot. It's all so incestuous.
Good lord, dogpile is also still up and functioning. As is webcrawler. Doesn't anything on line ever die? Archie? Veronica? You still out there?
Apart from search engines, which fall out of favor when better versions are developed, the life cycle of really useful websites was that they would spring up and be wonderful and then get "improved" to the point where they sucked, and the best example of that I could think of was Mapblast.
I haven't used Mapblast since it was sold and improved and made sucky and everyone switched over to Mapquest or Google Maps. Before any of them, I had a Rand McNally Tripmaker disk. Now Tripmaker is on-line, but it's clearly channeling someone else's software except that, when I switch to the aerial view, it appears that the Adirondack forest is now pink. I guess that's what distinguishes Tripmaker from whoever they're channeling.
(Back in the days it was on disk, I had problems with Tripmaker because one of its "bunnies" — the little fictions that map makers slip in to catch copyright thieves — was a road that led directly from Old Forge NY to my hometown of Star Lake, which I promise does not exist but which it kept suggesting I take. Perils of living somewhere that nobody else is going.)
Anyway, I went to see if Mapblast was still on line and it sorta kinda is, except that, if you type in www.mapblast.com, it sends you to Bing maps.
I haven't tried it, because I want to preserve my own private fantasy that Bing maps would be like the rest of Bing, so that getting directions from it would be like asking for directions down at Cheers, with people sending you on idiotic routes of their own device that would not only take longer and be more confusing than the most direct route but would ultimately not get you to the place you asked about anyway.
As far as I can tell, Bing is based in large part on "common wisdom" – one of the great oxymorons — and stands as irrefutable proof of the classic quote from Robert Wilensky, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that this is not true."
When you ask Bing something, you get back what most people seem to think is the right answer. Good. That's just what we need in an election year.
There is, of course, an element of majority rules in determining what is the truth, but that was always something theoretical to be pondered by philosophy-of-history scholars, until recently, when it became, by ironic self-fulfilling consensus, a fact.
And I suppose that, if more discerning people were to use Bing, the results would start to improve. All search engines — certainly Google — contain in their algorithms an element that skews them towards what most users mean when they look for something. Maybe the TV ads when Bing launched simply attracted some very silly people and this is something you could correct for over time.
But it's been quite a while since the corrections that time brings have made much of an improvement.
NOTICE: Will the last one to leave please turn off the Enlightenment?
Comments 7
Comments are closed.