Web: End of ‘Ask Jeeves’, Feather Wiki, Reverting Back to RSS, and Blocking Ads (Spyware)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 05, 2026

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Popular 90s search engine ‘Ask Jeeves’ finally bites the dust — parent company shutters website that pioneered natural language queries, only a placeholder results page remains

  Despite being older than Google by a couple of years, Ask Jeeves wasn’t able to compete against it or Yahoo!, which soon became staples of [Internet] search in the 2000s. Yahoo! itself is still surviving, although it has convincingly been left in the dust by its rival, which has since become an all-encompassing tech giant and a leader in the AI race. Ask Jeeves follows in the footsteps of Alta Vista, another '90s search engine that fell victim to Google’s groundbreaking PageRank algorithm.

• Naty S ☛ How I Use Feather Wiki as a Private Brain Dump Tool

  I discovered Feather Wiki indirectly via fellow blogger, Jack Baty. He uses many different tools for his multiple blogs; and for one of them he uses TiddlyWiki, which is a feature-rich “non-linear personal web notebook”.

  Inspired by TiddlyWiki, Feather Wiki is a lightweight alternative built from the ground up, with a completely original codebase; which was perfect for my use case. It’s created by Robbie @Alamantus. I love the fact it is just a single HTML file that starts at 58kB! The interface is minimal yet extensible, supports Markdown (a must for me), and is very snappy which is important (I can’t stand lag 😅). Read about their features or FAQs.

  This post serves as a reference on how I am using Feather Wiki’s HTML file smoothly on Android devices with multi-device, local-only syncing by using Syncthing.

• SusamPal ☛ From RSS to Atom

  Does any of this matter today? I think it does. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS and Atom are dead, most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds, even in 2026. Every time I publish a new post, I can see a good number of visitors arriving from feed readers. From the referrer data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are web feeds, newsletters and search engines, in that order.

• Chromium

  • Incognito Cat ☛ In the Lab: Inside Brave Origin & Containers | Incognito Cat

    Brave Origin is a streamlined, minimalist version of Brave. It keeps the full Shields protection and the complete privacy stack while removing the revenue-focused features such as Rewards, VPN, Wallet, News, Leo AI, and similar extras. In simple terms, it is Brave with everything most privacy users normally turn off already removed.

    The current one-time price is $59.99 USD. Linux users can get it for free.

    Origin is currently in beta and available through the Nightly build channel. We downloaded the latest nightly build and put it through its paces. Almost everything worked exactly as expected, with just a couple of small issues.