Ask Jeeves is quietly closing after nearly three decades, after pioneering conversational web search long before ChatGPT and Gemini.

Ask Jeeves has closed after almost 30 years
He pioneered natural language web searches.
Today, ChatGPT and Gemini work similarly

With AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini available, it’s now easy to perform web searches like “what are the best places of interest in Rome?” or “how do you fix a leaky shower?”, but this natural language format was started almost 30 years ago, and by a search portal that has just closed.

The portal was Ask Jeeves, later renamed Ask.com, and was fully opened to the public on June 1, 1997. As XDA Developers reports, what was left of Ask.com has been closed by its current owner, InterActiveCorp (IAC).

If you were online just as the internet was taking off, you’ll remember Ask Jeeves and its eponymous butler character, named after the valet 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 was launched, Google was still a prototypical university project and offered something genuinely different to the search engines and web directories of the time (including Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos).

‘Deeply grateful’

(Image credit: Ask Jeeves/Ask.com)

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 British 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 “focus more” on other areas. The official end date for Ask Jeeves and Ask.com was May 1, 2026.

“We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers and teams who built and supported Ask for decades,” says IAC. “And to you, the millions of users who came 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 while Google and other AI-led companies are trying to make web search a natural conversation again, the site that pioneered this approach is shutting down. Ask Jeeves was really ahead of its time, back in 1997.

Google logo on black background next to text that says