Barry Diller; the death of Jeeves and now Newsweek... by Harvey Wallbangers
Barry Diller; the death of Jeeves and now Newsweek...
 by Harvey Wallbangers
 Friday, November 12th, 2010
 New York, NY
 Views: 10,162
 
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Barry Diller excels at one thing. Turning popular media properties into steaming piles of pooh...

For those of you too young to remember, there once was a great website called AskJeeves.com which provided the internet with one of the first "Natural Language Search" engines.

That means you could type in "What is the capital of France", hit submit and Jeeves the butler would bring you the answer; "Paris" along with some other relevant information about France and world capitals in his Jeevishly cool way.

Google has something like this today as well, but you still have to read through the search results to cull the answer from snippets of results instead of just telling you the answer like Jeeves used to.

Ask.com still has this basic "Natural Language Search" feature but the other results are hardly relevant, full of banner ads and I still miss Jeeves.

AskJeeves.com was one of my favorite search engines back in the 90's (founded in 1996), that is until Barry Diller bought it up for 1.8 Billion in 2005, fired Jeeves and renamed it ask.com. Then Barry gutted the site and turned it into an ad engine donkey for his InterActiveCorp (IAC).

Now days there are others like Wolfram Alpha, a "Computational Knowledge Engine" which I have yet to bother with other than asking it how to spell penis. Some even call this AI Search, but I say “bullshit by any other name still smells like bullshit” and you can quote me on that. It's "Natural Language Search". Period.

I still want AskJeeves.com back, butler logo and all! (yeah, I know I'm a few years late with my rant on that one).

Now Diller is mucking up Newsweek by merging it with a blog? Really? A blog?!? You have got to be kidding me! (no, sorry, not a joke).

I think that’s offensive Mr. Diller.

Newsweek was founded on Feb. 17, 1933 by Thomas J.C. Martyn, a former foreign editor at Time magazine. It survived the invention of television, WWII, the Korean War, The Vietnam War, the Iran Contra scandal as well as the 24 hour news cycle. That is until Barry Diller and his crew of cash sucking cronies got their hands on it. [Click here to read the History of Newsweek]

Barry, please get out of the media business and stick to buying Coca Cola stock. I'll even give you a dollar for ask.com (which is more than you've ever made off the AskJeeves.com buyout) if you just go home and act your age by wearing depends undergarments and whining about how cold it is in the living room.

Someone needs to tell Grandpa Diller to get out of the kid’s chat rooms because it’s creepy. Oh and Barry, I hear AOL is for sale. You might get it for under a few billion if you hurry!


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Last updated by Harvey Wallbangers - Friday, November 12th, 2010 -  New York, NY

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