- Ask Jeeves has closed after almost 30 years
- It pioneered natural language web searches
- Today, ChatGPT and Gemini work in similar ways
With AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini available, it’s now easy to run web searches like “what are the best sights in Rome?” or “how do you fix a leaky shower?”, but this natural language format was actually developed almost 30 years ago – and by a search portal that has just closed.
The portal was Ask Jeeves, later renamed Ask.com, and it fully opened to the public on June 1, 1997. As XDA Developers reports, what remains of Ask.com has now been shut down by its current owner, InterActiveCorp (IAC).
If you were online right when the internet took off, you’ll remember Ask Jeeves and its eponymous butler character – named after the butler Jeeves in the PG Wodehouse stories. The idea was to ask questions and get answers from the growing amount of information on the web, not just search for topics like “sports” or “movies”.
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At the time Ask Jeeves launched, Google was still a prototype university project, and it offered something truly different from the search engines and web directories of the time (including Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos).
‘Deeply grateful’
Of course, Google completely changed the web search landscape, and after its initial success, Ask Jeeves struggled. It was renamed Ask.com in February 2006 when Jeeves was removed from the search portal, although the butler character reappeared on the UK version of the site between 2009 and 2016.
IAC took over operations in 2005 and has now made the decision to close the search engine to “sharpen focus” on other areas. The official end date for Ask Jeeves and Ask.com was 1 May 2026.
“We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers and teams who have built and supported Ask over the decades,” says IAC. “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. The spirit of Jeeves lives on.”
It’s interesting that as Google and other AI-led companies try to make web search a natural conversation again, the site that first pioneered the approach is shutting down. Ask Jeeves was truly ahead of its time, back in 1997.
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