Ask.com shuts down after 30 years

Ask.com, originally founded as the Y2K stalwart Ask Jeeves, is officially dead.

Ask Jeeves was launched in 1997 by the Berkeley-based duo Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, a year before Google’s now-dominant search engine debuted to the masses.

At the time, Ask Jeeves’ natural language processing, combined with its personality-filled voice and branding, made it the go-to web search and answer engine for early internet adopters.

The website’s butler mascot, Jeeves, modeled after the P.G. Wodehouse character, made appearances at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, holding its own against other iconic corporate logos of the early 2000s.

“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,” a message on the Ask.com website currently reads.

But while many still refer to the site by its 1990s name, Ask.com hasn’t been “Ask Jeeves” for nearly 20 years, with the brand dropping the latter word and its valet logo in 2006, The shift came after a change in ownership, when the brand was transferred to American holding company IAC. In 2009, Ask.com was dubbed the official search engine of NASCAR.

“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,” a message on the Ask.com website currently reads.

Amid an overwhelming shift toward generative AI-powered search engines and a repositioning of AI agents as the future of web browsing, the loss of Ask.com feels like a true end of the early dot-com era.