Ask.com shuts down after 30 years, and no one thought to resurrect Jeeves as an LLM
daveholtz · x · 2026-09-06
What happened
IAC has discontinued its search business: Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026, after 30 years. The farewell page thanks millions of users and the engineering/design teams, ending with "Jeeves' spirit endures."
Background
- Ask Jeeves launched in the late '90s as a natural-language Q&A search engine, later folded into IAC.
The hot take
Blogger daveholtz notes the irony: in the LLM era, nobody at IAC tried resurrecting the Jeeves brand—an identity built on natural-language answers decades early—as an AI product.
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