Ask.com has pulled the plug after nearly 30 years, taking its polite digital-butler search engine, Jeeves, with it.
A 1999 press release boasted that “Jeeves” answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. In the digital swamp of Y2K, people pestered him about Britney Spears, tamagotchis and whatever else passed for civilisation before we were influenced into brain fog.
The New York Times remembered: “In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions. We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online valet who led us into the depths of cyberspace.”
Now Jeeves and Ask.com are dead, joining the dustier shelves of the old web. After almost 30 years, the question-and-answer service and former search engine shut down.
“To you, the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world, thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust,” the company said in a notice on its now-defunct website.
Ask Jeeves was created in Berkeley, California, during the dot-com gold rush and first appeared on screens in 1996.
Its mascot, Jeeves, was modelled on the clever English butler from P G Wodehouse’s book series. The pitch was simple enough: type in a question and get an answer.
The quality of those answers was wobbly, and the site was soon shoved aside by Google and Yahoo as search became less a parlour trick and more a money printer.
InterActive Corp bought the site for more than $1 billion in 2005 and threw cash at it to help compete as a search engine.
It rebranded as Ask.com and, as part of the makeover, dumped Jeeves in 2006. Apparently, even digital butlers can be made redundant by branding people.
The site was scrappy and inventive. It was among the first to introduce hyperlocal map overlays in searches and include thumbnails of webpages.
“They are doing a lot of clever and interesting things,” a Google executive said at the time.
Even so, Ask.com struggled to keep up. In 2010, it returned to its old question-and-answer format.
That did not save it from newer crowdsourced rivals such as Quora or Google’s march across the web like a spreadsheet with a search box.
Google now dominates search traffic and much of the world’s general experience of the internet.
The site’s natural-language answers may even have been an early hint of today’s AI chatbot craze, minus the venture-capital confetti and hallucinated legal citations.
Now, Ask.com joins the Internet graveyard that includes competitors like AltaVista, which shut down in 2013. With Ask.com gone, alongside AIM and AOL dial-up services also sunsetting, we’re truly coming to the end of an era of the Internet.
