Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google

Comments

• BurningnnTree@lemmy.one ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I remember using ChaCha. Good times

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  • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I made enough money on chacha one month to pay for some weed!

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• matengor@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I used SMS google search and SMS ChaCha, they were great at a time when mobile data was super expensive.

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    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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    • Harold_Penisman@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Totally forgot about ChaCha. Those were the days.

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  • jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I had heard of them but had no idea there were so many of them

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• essteeyou@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  118 118 had great ads. My friend and I dressed as the 118 118 guys for a sports event at work. :-D

  youtu.be/vB9H1Ot7j0s

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  • Lmaydev@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We did this for a friend’s birthday at uni. There were about 20 of us. Great night haha

    I used to love texting these numbers when drunk.

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• IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…

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  • Fredselfish@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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    • erwan@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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  • jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ask Jeeves wasn’t an actual person though

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    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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• recursive_recursion@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  guess we replaced Google
  Noice🤌

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• boatsnhos931@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ain’t that so sweet

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