If you were one of the people who went online during the mid-90s, you didn’t rely on Google if you wanted to find anything across the wild west of the internet. Instead, you may have visited a distinguished gentleman wearing a suit named Jeeves to guide you in the chaotic land that was known as the “information superhighway.” The page, Ask Jeeves, wasn’t just an early search engine — it was also a precursor to the AI chatbots we know today with its goal of answering users’ questions through natural language processing. Unfortunately, its parent company, IAC, has announced that it’s changing its focus and will retire Ask.com, the successor to AskJeeves.com, after 30 years of service.
When you visit Ask.com, you can read the company’s final statement: “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,” Ask writes. “To the millions who asked... We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you—the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world—thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust. Jeeves’ spirit endures.” The original AskJeeves.com page still appears to be online, and you can still get some results of a limited scope.
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 behind in the dust by its rival which has since become an all-encompassing tech giant and is one of the leaders in the AI race. Ask Jeeves is following in the footsteps of Alta Vista, another ‘90s search engine that fell victim to Google’s groundbreaking PageRank algorithm.
One thing that made Ask Jeeves stand out from the competition was that it allowed users to search using natural language queries — i.e., asking it questions like you’re talking to another person instead of using keywords and Boolean operators. This is how many AI-powered search engines run nowadays, and Ask Jeeves was able to achieve that to some extent without using a large language model.
But it seems that IAC is no longer interested in keeping Ask.com alive, and it’s completely shutting it down. It also didn’t pivot towards AI, data centers, or semiconductors, something that other companies that aren’t even tech-related, like struggling shoemaker and apparel brand Allbirds and Japanese toilet-maker Toto, have done so. Nevertheless, this might be a fitting retirement for the search engine valet — after 30 years of serving up answers online, it’s time for it to rest and ride off into the sunset.
