Information Please - Random Trivia Answers

• A1) Google. The service, whose phone number can be more easily remembered as 1-800-GOOG-411, can answer generic spoken requests like "gas station".
• A2) Free 411. For the annoyance of listening to a relevant ad, Jingle Networks's 1-800-FREE-411 gives you directory assistance without a charge.
• A3) Tellme. In addition to phone numbers, Tellme also provides maps, movies, weather, and more.
• A4) Frucall. Entering a product's barcode number will return pricing information from online sites. Your search history is available via any web browser.
• A5) Yahoo!. Stanford electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo soon renamed their company for the Gulliver's Travels characters, unnecessarily expanding to the awful "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".
• A6) Infoseek. A merger with Starwave produced Go.com, which still exists but has been treading water since 2001.
• A7) Lycos. Spain's Terra Networks bought the company for $5.4 billion in May 2000.
• A8) Altavista. Originally a showcase for DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor, the search engine proved popular enough for Digital to pay AltaVista Technology Incorporated 3.3 million dollars for the altavista.com domain name. Altavista is now owned by Yahoo!
• A9) Dogpile. The site is funded by a page of sponsored links returned with each query.
• A10) iWon.com. Ask Jeeves bought the company in 2004 and was in turn acquired by InterActiveCorp a year later.
• A11) Amazon. Because A9 keeps a history of all of your searches, you may prefer the anonymous Generic A9.
• A12) Baidu. Less than a year later, the site, which began as an MP3 search engine, reached number nine in Alexa's internet rankings.