ChatGPT’s more civilised grandad Ask Jeeves shuts down forever

Ask.com, once the home of Ask Jeeves and a precursor to ChatGPT, quietly slipped from the internet over the weekend.

The website published a statement from owner InterActiveCorp (IAC) that confirmed the once-staple search engine had closed after 25 years.

‘Every great search must come to an end,’ the company, which has owned Ask.com since 2005, said.

‘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.’

It continued: ‘We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers and teams who built and supported Ask over 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 trust.

Ask Jeeves was among the internet’s first search engines that achieved mainstream success.

It was based on the smart and informative English butler Reginald Jeeves created by writer PG Wodehouse.

Garrett Gruener and David Warthen used the character and invited users to ask him questions when they launched the initial version of Ask Jeeves in 1996 in Berkeley, California.

Originally branded Ask Jeeves, it asked users to type full questions in plain English rather than keywords.

Responses were styled as if delivered by a human, in stark alignment with the format ChatGPT and other generative AI models produce responses.

The search engine quickly exploded in popularity after it was released to the public, handling more than one million queries a day within two years of launch.

This led to it positioning itself as a direct rival to Google, as it became one of the most visited websites from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

As the 2000s progressed, its popularity fell and it was rebranded as Ask.com in 2006.

This was seen as an attempt to modernise and compete with rivals search engines including Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.

But it struggled to compete with Google, as its search function expanded beyond simple link-based results to include images, maps and integrated answers.

This gave users more accurate and in-depth answers to queries, something Ask.com struggled to compete with.

In 2010, Ask.com moved towards a question-and-answer format, but faced stiff competition from platforms such as Quora and other evolving search technologies.

Ask.com never really competed after its late 90s peak, although it is fondly remembered by many millennials who recall it being the go-to search engine before Google dominated the market.

Now its disappearance leaves it following in the footsteps of other early internet brands that have been condemned to the internet’s dustbin after fading to irrelevance.