When was ask created

Not too long after the world itself was created , Odin was walking along the coast of one of the new land masses. With him were two other gods: in one version, these were his brothers Vili and Ve , [1] and in another version, they were the obscure figures Hoenir and Lodurr.

The three deities found two tree trunks, perhaps pieces of driftwood, lying on the beach. They were shaped like a man and a woman, but they were lifeless and powerless. So the three gods decided to give them what they lacked and make them true humans. Odin blew into them the breath of life, while his two companions imparted inspired mental activity , a healthy complexion, and the ability to speak, hear, and see. They became the father and mother of the entire human species. In the Viking Age, there was surely more to this story that has since been lost due to the rather sparse and fragmentary nature of the primary sources.

Google represents just one book in this series, offering up only the information that its authors -- i. Given Google's dominance as a search engine, everyone around the world is reading the same book, while , other stories collect dust on the shelves.

Even though searching is becoming more personalized, tailored to a user's location, interests, purchases, email subscriptions and past inquiries, these results still live entirely within the book that Google wrote. Simply by deciding which information most of the world should see, Google has the power to build or destroy businesses of all sizes, shift election results , sway public opinion and reinforce the unconscious biases of developers themselves. Here's how The Guardian put it in For example, search for the word 'man,' and you get images almost entirely of white men, albeit of varying ages.

A search for the word 'woman' also reveals an overwhelming majority of young, white women. Considering that the majority of the global population is non-white, we do immediately see how white, western-centric biases -- from race and gender beliefs to cultural standards of beauty and value -- dominate the very way the web works and what stories it tells about humanity.

Google is the Westernized, for-profit steward of our ever-expanding digital reality, but it wasn't always so. Back in the late '90s, Google Search was competing with a handful of other engines, most of which have faded into the ether by now.

Here's a look back at three search engines that Google gobbled up nearly 20 years ago. Ask Jeeves was a character-driven search engine, if ever there was one. Founded in , Ask Jeeves featured a well-dressed valet who supposedly fetched search results and was able to understand questions posed in everyday phrasing.

Natural language processing is still tricky for developers today -- just ask Siri anything -- so this was a daunting pre-Y2K goal. Ask Jeeves lasted until roughly , when it was rebranded as Ask. If humanity's knowledge is a series of books, Dogpile is an attempt to let people read more than one volume. The site, founded in , is a metasearch engine that collects results from a range of sources. The site's mission is driven by data -- in , Dogpile partnered with the Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University to study results from the four most popular search engines of the day, Google, Ask.

Here's a quick summary of what researchers found :. The overlap across the first page of search results from all four of these search engines was found to be only a staggering 0. The company, like the operators of other search engines, wanted to create the most practical and relevant tool to help users navigate the Web. Search engines served as gateways to other sites offering information, products, and services--the conduit through which many Internet searchers passed to get where they wanted to go.

By creating a popular destination that handled a high volume of traffic, Warthen and Gruener could command fees from the corporate web sites their search engine revealed to customers.

Ask Jeeves, emerging as the first search engine capable of responding to natural language questions, found a receptive audience among Internet users, giving Warthen and Gruener the leverage to court advertising dollars. In October , Ask Jeeves reached , searches per day, a figure that extended to one million by May and two million by October The company's cartoon mascot, a portly butler based on the English valet in P. Wodehouse novels, was a ubiquitous fixture on the Internet by the end of the s.

Ask Jeeves took advantage of its recognition by completing an initial public offering IPO of stock, exposing the company to the public spotlight.

The IPO, completed in July , was a spectacular success, ranking at the time as the third most successful first day performance in business history. The company by this point was led by Robert W. Wrubel, who was appointed president in May and chief executive officer in November Wrubel, who held various executive positions at an educational software company, Knowledge Adventure, Inc.

The campaign, intended to create a national brand, was far-reaching, exemplifying "the excesses of the dot-com era," as Forbes noted in its February 3, issue.

The company's branding campaign included sticking Ask Jeeves logos on apples and bananas. It entailed sending a troupe of individuals dressed as butlers to business districts, where resemblances of the company's icon were seen at popular lunch locations.

The heady mood pervading Ask Jeeves headquarters during the late s was typified in areas other than the company's wide-ranging advertising campaign. The company leased expansive new office space, adding tens of thousands of square feet to its existing property holdings. Ask Jeeves also expanded internationally, launching Ask Jeeves UK as a joint venture with two British media companies in December The company completed several acquisitions as well, purchasing Net Effect Systems, Inc.

Net Effect provided live help service to corporate web sites, enabling companies to communicate with their customers with real-time text messaging. As Ask Jeeves expanded and its natural language online services grew increasingly popular, the company's revenues increased exponentially. Profits, however, failed to materialize amid the energetic revenue growth. Perhaps more disheartening to Wrubel and his executive team, investors were losing faith in the company, causing Ask Jeeves's stock value to plummet severely.