Ask.com just quietly shut down after almost 30 years in operation
The search engine follows a spate of Y2K sites to the digital graveyard as AI bots take over the query space.
While it’s getting easier to forget in the days of increasing chatbot dependence, people in the early digital age often took their queries to a search engine where Jeeves — a sharp-witted, sharp-dressing English butler, named for the character in PG Wodehouse’s early 20th-century book series — would guide your way, on a site later renamed as Ask.com. Now, one of the last remaining bastions of the wholesome early cyberspace era has politely excused himself for good.
Terribly sorry, sir
After being bought by InterActive Corp. in 2005 and losing the Jeeves branding a year later, the Ask.com homepage now reads: “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.”
Founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California, Jeeves first appeared on the web in 1996 — a whole year before Google debuted its now dominant search engine. Still, as is often the business case for first movers, it wasn’t too long before search-and-answer stalwarts like Alphabet’s engine and Yahoo overtook Jeeves... now themselves getting overshadowed by AI.
Per Google Trends data, queries for “ask jeeves” fell by ~60% between 2005-06 as it rebranded; then, searches for “ask.com” saw a gradual slump from 2010-20, similar to the drop seen for “yahoo” searches. Alongside that decade-long decline, forums like Quora and Reddit became more popular — and while the former has fallen off in the ’20s, the latter just keeps rising.
More recently, queries for AI chatbots have soared, with searches for “claude” and “gemini” soaring 670% and 450%, respectively, in the year up to April 2026. But, at least among the search engines, Google reigns supreme, with the slump in searches it has seen perhaps more to do with a late realization that you don’t have to start by Googling “google.”
Dotted line?
Like a sort of tricennial reckoning, it seems the buzzy names of the dot-com boom are being split into big winners and big losers. While tech giants like Intel and Dell are on a tear, Jeeves joins the likes of Internet Explorer, AOL, and countless others in the web’s digital graveyard.
