Ask.com shutters after almost 30 years, ending the Ask Jeeves era
Ask.com, originally launched as Ask Jeeves in 1997, will close operations on May 1, 2026 as its parent IAC shifts away from the search business. The service popularized a natural-language Q&A interface with the Jeeves mascot, rebranded to Ask.com in 2006, and shut its independent web crawler in 2010. Despite early competition with Yahoo, Google’s dominance and the rise of other Q&A sites left Ask.com behind, prompting online nostalgia and debate over what a modern Jeeves-inspired AI could have become.