Search engine ask.com finally shut down
Service, launched as “Ask Jeeves” before the turn of the millennium, was one of the oldest internet search engines. On May 1, the operator shut down ask.com.
Typing hands, with symbols and the letters AI floating above them.
(Image: Shutterstock/Poca Wander Stock)
One of the oldest search engines on the internet is no longer accepting queries. The owner has given up on ask.com after more than 25 years. Since May 1, 2026, the website has only displayed a message about the discontinuation of the service and no longer offers users an input option. The operator justifies the move by sharpening its focus. The search business is apparently no longer part of it.
Ask.com was launched in 1996 under the name “Ask Jeeves.” Users were supposed to be able to search for keywords but also receive answers to questions formulated in natural language. For ten years, the butler Jeeves presented the search results before he retired in 2006. A year earlier, Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp (IAC) had bought the company for a hefty 1.85 billion US dollars.
No longer a search engine recently
Ten years after its founding, ask.com also launched in Germany after the service had indexed a large part of the German-speaking web. Ask.com also experimented with localized versions of its search engine in some other European countries (Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain) at that time. However, market shares remained in the low single-digit percentage range.
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This was one of the reasons for the demise of the ask.com search engine about fifteen and a half years ago. Since the end of 2010, the platform has been limited to answers from a fixed question-and-answer catalog. Users could also answer other users' questions. This was reminiscent of the end of Lycos.de, which was last only present through the question-and-answer service Lycos IQ.
Ask.com was like today's AI search engines 25 years ago
However, ask.com can certainly be described as a pioneer of today's AI search engines, as the search service encouraged users to ask their questions in full sentences -- entirely in the spirit of natural language models. In contrast, other traditional search engines like Google or Microsoft Bing required explicit keywords to quickly get the desired information.
However, the popularity of today's AI services may also have contributed to the end of ask.com. Apparently, operating ask.com was no longer worthwhile for IAC, so the US internet company has now discontinued the platform. The operators thank not only the engineers, designers, and teams who developed the platform over the decades but also the millions of users who have queried ask.com.
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