• Matengor@lemmy.ml
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    5 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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
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      5 months ago

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

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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        5 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.

        • sugar_in_your_tea
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          5 months ago

          That’s a fantastic song though. I didn’t grow up in that era, but it’s most of what I listen to these days.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      I had heard of them but had no idea there were so many of them or that they were so successful

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      5 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.

      • erwan@lemmy.ml
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        5 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.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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        5 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.

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      5 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.