That Will Be All, Jeeves - Ask.com Search Shuts Down

Ask.com, the search site that began life as AskJeeves, has been officially shuttered by its owner, InterActiveCorp (IAC). The company paid $1.8bn for it in 2005, around which time it ranked 4th in UK search with above 5% share.

The original AskJeeves, launched in 1996, was distinguished by its chattier interface - it encouraged natural language questions while other engines expected a few keywords only. News site Techcrunch, announcing the closure today, suggested this made it 'arguably' a precursor of AI search, but DRNO reckons you'd have to really like arguing to run that one.

Following the IAC acquisition in 2005, the iconic butler was retired and the engine became merely ask.com, but the 2006 share of 5.4% could not be maintained in the face of stiffer competition from others, chiefly Google, and the lack of recognition of the new, blander name didn't help. By 2009 IAC brought back Jeeves, with research from YouGov finding most people wanted the butler reinstated, and that more UK respondents knew the AskJeeves brand (83%) than the function of Ask.com (72%). He has since disappeared again, and other attempts to expand Ask's offering, such as the 2012 launch of an instant mobile polling app called Pollroll, also failed to stem the flow of traffic to the dominant players.

A message on Ask.com today states: 'After 30 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026. 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.'

Frankly, we had assumed Ask was closed a while back - sorry - but it seemed worth a nostalgic footnote. For those looking to avoid big tech search, www.duckduckgo.com is still very much an option.