Ask.com, which was called AskJeeves twenty years ago, is no more.
You can tell that someone didn’t really use the Internet in the 90s if they say AskJeeves was a big part of online life at that time. I’ve long suspected that AltaVista, the search giant in pre-Google days, has been memory-spurred because it vaguely resembles “AskJeeves” if you squint.
Anyway, AskJeeves was a bit of fun, because people would be like “Internet?” I’ve seen it made fun of on hit TV shows like Mad About You, but I don’t know what it is. And you’ll say, “Oh, you’re missing out! Look, it has a butler who answers questions!”
And if the question was “What time is it?” or “How many cups are there in a gallon?” The little cartoon Jeeves will give you a reliable answer. But nothing good came out of most of the questions. The Internet doesn’t work for this kind of thing yet, so most queries produce a boring page of search results. And once the demo ended and you actually wanted to read a Babylon 5 episode guide or something, you’d go back to AltaVista.
After the dot-com bubble, and a multi-year decline for most Internet companies, the site rebranded itself as Ask.com, and Jeeves, we were told, was retired.
As of May 1, 2026, Ask.com is simply a legacy of parent company IAC. “As IAC continues to focus its efforts, we have decided to close down our search business, which includes Ask.com,” the message said in part.
It ends, “Jeeves’ spirit endures,” and I find that part ominous.
Not to be mean, but let’s all hope in the spirit of Jeeves can’t bear it. Let’s let it get lost in the fog of 90s nostalgia and never come back. The whole idea behind AskJeeves was that it was essentially a natural language chatbot. Then came SmarterChild, the AIM chatbot, which proved to be more fun than AskJeeves, and that was the last time anyone had any innocent fun with a chatbot.
PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a public domain character, and if you want to know what it would be like to interact with Jeeves as a modern chatbot, simply activate the cloud, tell it to pretend to be Jeeves, and ask it a question.
You go there. It would be the same if the soul of the creature remained in the present in the form of an AI chatbot. This would be very cute for a second- “Wow, he tells you the actual weather like Jeeves haha!” Then after two seconds it starts feeling empty and gross. And if you take it further than that, it starts getting dark.
I hope that by pointing out this possibility, I have made this idea dissolve into nothingness rather than reveal it. rest in peace-forever-Jeeves.
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