The Ask Jeeves Era Is Officially Over

The early internet's favorite search engine has gone extinct. Ask.com, born in 1997 as Ask Jeeves, has been shut down by parent company IAC, which quietly ended the search site's run on Friday after nearly 30 years online. A note on the now-static homepage says IAC "made the decision to discontinue our search business," and thanks "millions of users" for turning to the service over the decades. Once "the go-to web search," its loss "feels like a true end of the early dot-com era," per Mashable. It's proof of "the decay of a simpler digital time," per the New York Times.

Ask Jeeves launched a year before Google and stood out for letting users type in full questions and get answers, seemingly from its well-dressed butler mascot Jeeves, inspired by PG Wodehouse's character. The mascot formed part of an iconic logo before the company dropped Jeeves in 2006 following its sale to IAC. By then, Google and Yahoo had outshone Ask Jeeves, whose answers had become questionable, per the Times. The shutdown lands as internet search shifts toward AI-powered tools and chat-style assistants, marking another early dot-com name that couldn't keep pace with the new wave.