Overview
- Ask.com, which posted a farewell Friday, confirmed it closed its search service on May 1, 2026 under IAC’s decision to discontinue its search business.
- The homepage now carries a thank‑you note that ends with “Jeeves’ spirit endures,” and searches return limited or placeholder results, at times pointing to other IAC sites.
- Launched to the public in 1997 as Ask Jeeves by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, the service stood out by letting people type full questions in plain English and by its butler mascot.
- IAC acquired the company in 2005, dropped the Jeeves branding in 2006, and by 2010 had shut its own web crawler, laid off engineers, outsourced core search, and shifted to a Q&A community model.
- Coverage frames the shutdown as the close of a Web 1.0 brand during a moment when AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s tools are reviving conversational, answer‑first search that Ask pioneered.