Onetime Google competitor Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, throws in the towel after almost 30 years: 'Jeeves' spirit endures'

Former ask.com mascot Jeeves, a cartoon butler. — (Image credit: Ask.com)

Ask.com is no more: The onetime Burger King to Google's McDonalds has shuttered its search engine after nearly 30 years⁠—though the exact count seems to depend on who you ask⁠—with its website now turning up a farewell message to users.

"Every great search must come to an end," reads the message shared to Ask.com. "As [Ask.com parent company] 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.

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"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."

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~~Jeeves will return in Avengers: Doomsday~~. Most of you are probably surprised Ask.com was even still around to be shuttered, but it still feels like a sign of the times: A relic of the dot com era fizzling out in the age of AI. Ironically, Ask.com's original branding as "Ask Jeeves," with the anthropomorphized butler offering a more conversational experience, is uncomfortably similar to the promise of AI chatbots.

Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 and went live the following year, earning a fond place in many geriatric millennials' hearts as a fun website that probably wasn't blocked by your school computer lab. Ask Jeeves was rebranded to the more buttoned-up (less? Because Jeeves wore a suit?) Ask.com in 2006, but even its domain authority on a fundamental verb couldn't compete with Google. Ask ceased internal development of search tools in 2010, and honestly does not appear to have done much of note in the intervening 16 years.

I don't get the "after 25 years" bit in the farewell message⁠—if you want to round up to Ask Jeeves' initial founding, it would be a nice, even 30, but even going by operation, we're still talking 29 years since Ask Jeeves entered open beta, then 1.0 in 1997. The rebrand was exactly 20 years ago⁠—that could have been a nice cutoff, if you didn't mind spitting in Jeeves' face and wiping your ass with his legacy⁠—but 2001 just doesn't seem like a particularly important year for the service, aside from acquiring another search engine. I'd ask Jeeves about all this, but he's no longer with us.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.