Ask Jeeves shuts down after 30 years as AI search reshapes how we find information online

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

The online search valet is finally retiring after 30 years of serving up answers to our millions of questions. 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. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Ask Jeeves closes just as AI brings back chat-to-search

Like actual butlers, this relic of the first dotcom boom has been a quaint anachronism for decades In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites. Then came Garrett Gruener, David Warthen, and Gary Chevsky, who together devised Ask Jeeves - a search engine that offered the chance to ask natural language questions to a cartoon character that looked like a Butler. Like a real-life gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves would promptly and politely fetch whatever his master desired - in this case, a list of websites. Ask Jeeves distinguished itself with its quirky approach, and in 1999 went public amid the stock market frenzy of the first dotcom boom. A year later it was laying off staff. Search engines of the day relied on crawling the web and indexing it. In the late 1990s, Google started using its PageRank algorithm, which assessed the authoritativeness of sites based on the number and quality of backlinks. Google's approach delivered more relevant results, and the company started to gain serious market share. Rival crawler-based search outfits started to struggle, which may be why in 2004 Ask Jeeves acquired another early player, Excite. A year later, Ask Jeeves was itself acquired by an outfit called Inter-Active Corp (IAC), which soon retired the Jeeves character. The site persisted for years at ask.com, but never achieved much market share: IAC's description of the service says it's racked up 245 million global visits over 25 years, and reaches three percent of the global population. "Every great search must come to an end," reads the ask.com website. "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." "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." Indeed it does, because the new wave of AI-powered search allows natural language queries and - having scraped everything online without first asking for permission - gets the joke of a Butler/search engine. The Register proved this when, in honor of Ask Jeeves' passing, we prompted Google's AI search to rename itself Jeeves and adopt the persona of a search Butler. Google responded as follows: Microsoft's Copilot hedged, telling us "I can absolutely lean into a Butler persona for you - polished, attentive, and impeccably mannered - but I can't rename myself or change my identity. I'm still Microsoft Copilot, your AI companion."

The end of Ask.com, and the shifting sands of internet use - The Economic Times

After a 25-year run, Ask Jeeves has officially shut down as part of a strategic shift by parent company IAC. Launched in 1996 as a conversational search engine, the platform's closure reflects a broader transition in internet usage away from traditional search towards AI-driven direct answers.After a 25-year run, 'answer engine' Ask.com has officially shut down, marking the end of one of the internet's earliest attempts to make search more conversational and intuitive. It's parent company InterActiveCorp (IAC) announced that it is discontinuing its search business as part of a broader strategic shift, with the closure taking effect on May 1, 2026. "Every great search must come to an end. 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. Jeeves' spirit endures," IAC wrote in a note on the ask.com home page. Announcing the shutdown, IAC acknowledged the contributions of the engineers, designers, and teams who built and sustained the platform, while thanking millions of users worldwide for their curiosity and trust. Ask Jeeves Launched in 1996 as Ask Jeeves by founders Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, the platform stood out in the early days of the web for allowing users to pose questions in natural language rather than keyword-based queries. The service derived its name and identity from 'Jeeves,' the fictional valet created by British author P. G. Wodehouse, symbolising a digital assistant designed to fetch precise answers. In its early years, Ask built a niche for its question-and-answer functionality, particularly in areas such as mathematics, vocabulary, and unit conversion, while also hosting a wide range of editorial content akin to an online encyclopaedia. The holding company, IAC, bought the web search provider in 2005 for $1.85 billion in stock to capitalise on growth in internet advertising and search. The company underwent a major rebrand in 2006, dropping the 'Jeeves' persona to become Ask.com, alongside the development of its own web crawler and search algorithm. Over time, it expanded its database by integrating content from other IAC-owned properties, such as Investopedia and Travel+Leisure, making thousands of topic-based articles accessible through its platform. However, intensifying competition from larger rivals like Google gradually eroded its position. By 2010, Ask had outsourced its core search technology and repositioned itself as a question-and-answer platform, stepping back from direct competition in web search. Search and surf The shutdown of Ask.com points to a deeper shift in how the internet is used, moving away from the long-standing 'search and surf' culture that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing helped establish. That model was built on users querying the web and navigating the results. It is now being reshaped by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants and chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, which increasingly deliver direct answers rather than links. The shift is visible in declining search traffic for publishers, including lower link click-through rates due to Google's AI-generated overviews. Globally, Google dominates search with close to 90% market share, while engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo together make up most of the remaining 10%. Per a 2026 report by the data analytics firm Chartbeat, pageviews from Google Search dropped 34% between December 2024 and December 2025, while traffic from Google Discover declined 16% over the same period. Pageviews refer to the number of times webpages are opened by users after clicking on search results, while Google Discover is a personalised feed that shows users articles, videos, and updates based on their interests without requiring a search. The shift is also reflected in Google's parent Alphabet's earnings reported on Wednesday, where businesses other than its flagship search advertising are growing faster. Google Cloud leads this shift, with its revenue increasing 63% on-year to $20 billion in the first quarter of 2026, accounting for 18% of Alphabet's revenues. At the same time, the nature of internet traffic itself is also changing as bots accounted for over 53% of all web activity in 2025, up from 51% the previous year. Per a report by French tech giant Thales, human activity contributed to 47% of all web activity last year. Taken together, these trends suggest that the internet is no longer primarily a space users explore through search queries, but one increasingly mediated by AI systems and automated traffic, making the closure of Ask.com less an isolated event and more a marker of a structural transition in how the web is accessed and used.