{"id":937184,"date":"2026-05-04T13:30:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T13:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/937184\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T13:30:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T13:30:39","slug":"ask-jeeves-closes-just-as-ai-brings-back-chat-to-search-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/937184\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask Jeeves closes just as AI brings back chat-to-search \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites.<\/p>\n

Then came Garrett Gruener, David Warthen, and Gary Chevsky, who together devised Ask Jeeves<\/a> \u2013 a search engine that offered the chance to ask natural language questions to a cartoon character that looked like a Butler.<\/p>\n

Like a real-life gentleman\u2019s gentleman, Jeeves would promptly and politely fetch whatever his master desired \u2013 in this case, a list of websites.<\/p>\n

Ask Jeeves distinguished itself with its quirky approach, and in 1999 went public<\/a> amid the stock market frenzy of the first dotcom boom. A year later it was laying off staff<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Search engines of the day relied on crawling the web and indexing it. In the late 1990s, Google started using its PageRank algorithm, which assessed the authoritativeness of sites based on the number and quality of backlinks. Google\u2019s approach delivered more relevant results, and the company started to gain serious market share.<\/p>\n

Rival crawler-based search outfits started to struggle, which may be why in 2004 Ask Jeeves acquired<\/a> another early player, Excite.<\/p>\n

A year later, Ask Jeeves was itself acquired by an outfit called Inter-Active Corp (IAC), which soon retired the Jeeves character<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The site persisted for years at ask.com, but never achieved much market share: IAC\u2019s description<\/a> of the service says it\u2019s racked up 245 million global visits over 25 years, and reaches three percent of the global population.<\/p>\n

Neither figure is enough for the site to feature in StatCounter\u2019s list<\/a> of the top five search sites since 2009.<\/p>\n

Last Friday, the service shut its digital doors.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery great search must come to an end,\u201d reads the ask.com website. \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you \u2013 the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world \u2013 thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJeeves\u2019 spirit endures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed it does, because the new wave of AI-powered search allows natural language queries and \u2013 having scraped everything online without first asking for permission \u2013 gets the joke of a Butler\/search engine.<\/p>\n

The Register proved this when, in honor of Ask Jeeves\u2019 passing, we prompted Google\u2019s AI search to rename itself Jeeves and adopt the persona of a search Butler.<\/p>\n

Google responded as follows:<\/p>\n

Microsoft\u2019s Copilot hedged, telling us \u201cI can absolutely lean into a Butler persona for you \u2013 polished, attentive, and impeccably mannered \u2013 but I can\u2019t rename myself or change my identity. I\u2019m still Microsoft Copilot, your AI companion.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then Copilot got into the swing of things.<\/p>\n

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