Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google
Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google
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.
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Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…
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.
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.
Not talking about that one. The article mention multiple different types of platforms.
Ask Jeeves wasn’t an actual person though
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.