Ask.com (known originally as Ask Jeeves) was an answer engine, e-magazine, and former web search engine, operated by Ask Media Group. It was conceptualized and developed in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, based in Berkeley, California.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask.com reads:
Every great search
must come to an end.As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.
"To the millions who asked..."
We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And 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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by coolgopher on Monday May 04, @04:47AM (2 children)
It looks like https://www.askjeeves.com/ [askjeeves.com] is still up though... did they forget they had that domain as well?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday May 04, @01:17PM
I had forgotten all about that site. IIRC (and I probably don't), it was a pretty useless site, especially after Google started answering questions directly.
My dad's big brothers fought a world war against men like Donald Trump and his cabinet when he was a teenager.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Monday May 04, @09:44PM
looks like they did, but perhaps SN reminded them as it now shows the same as ask.com
Saying that, I had a chance to give askjeeves one last search to see how it now works. I was disappointed, it seems to just feed the query into Google under the skin and the output wasn't even formatted differently to Google. Askjeeves was already a hollowed out shell, so I guess at the end of the day nothing of value was lost.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Monday May 04, @08:42AM (1 child)
It is ironic to me that Ask Jeeves folds at the start of the age of LLMs, where you can actually ask questions to your computer the way you you would a human.
When I first came across Ask Jeeves many years ago, they still had the valet mascot, and their goal was to be a different search engine, one where instead of searching the usual way with search terms it was supposed to be a conversational search engine.
You would ask it a question structured as you would ask a human (namely your own personal digital valet) and it would return results. I am not sure exactly how it worked, it wasn't LLM based, but they had some logic that made it a bit like a chat program trying to interact as a human. Personally I really liked the idea and tired to use it many times, however it was in many ways ahead of its time and the technology was not up to the vision.
Therefore I myself (and no doubt other people) carried on using search terms with other search engines which were non-conversational. I had hoped they would improve Jeeves over time. but it seemed instead Ask gave up on their vision, removed the valet mascot and tried to be more like the other search engines, which I don't think helped them really.
Now with LLMs their original vision is not only possible, but the LLM can respond to you with the answer in a human form (you could probably get it to respond to you in the style of the original Jeeves [wikipedia.org] if you wished).
Their vision of a conversational search engine in the style of a valet is actually possible now, just when they folded. Seems like a missed opportunity, but I guess their USP of conversational search engine is gone now that every search engine (even duckduckgo) has an AI assistant response at the top when you search for something. They could have styled the LLM response as a British gentleman valet again, but perhaps that would have been too niche a taste to be profitable.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 04, @05:40PM
https://w3.pppl.gov/info/emacs/Incremental_Search.html [pppl.gov]
I remember when emacs incremental search was "new" in the editor world and I always envisioned the ask servers were something like that.
I informally search google that way start with a small search term then look at the results and add more/longer search terms to narrow in on what I want. I envisioned the ask servers worked that way, conversation turn #3 was just turn #1 concatenated with #2 and the new #3. Its a fairly cool idea. I would imagine that being this obvious, someone has long ago written a Chrome (etc) extension to implement something like that on google.
"npn transistor" (look at the results)
type in "2n3904" which gets concatenated to search "2n3904 npn transistor"
type in "datasheet" which gets concatenated to search "datasheet 2n3904 npn transistor"
Oh I see OnSemi makes a compatible one in the modern era type in "onsemi" which gets concatenated to search "onsemi datasheet 2n3904 npn transistor"
Pretty soon you're looking at a datasheet and I do this with Google using the search bar but a very simple extension or similar frontend could give google a "conversational" process like above.
Which is how I always imagined "ask" worked. Although its probably a lot more complicated IRL.