Ask.com, which was called AskJeeves until twenty years ago, is no more.
You can tell someone didn’t really use the internet in the 90s if they say AskJeeves was a big part of online life back then. I’ve long held a suspicion that AltaVista, the colossus of search in the pre-Google days, has been memory-holed because it vaguely looks like “AskJeeves” if you squint.
Anyway, AskJeeves was kinda fun, because people would be like “The Internet? I’ve seen it joked about on such hit TV programs as Mad About You, but I don’t know what it is.” And you would be like “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 in a gallon?” the little cartoon Jeeves would give you a credible answer. But most questions didn’t produce anything good. The internet didn’t work for things like that yet, so most queries just produced a boring page of search results. And once the demo was over and you actually wanted to read a Babylon 5 episode guide or something, you would go back to AltaVista.
After the dot com bubble, and the multi-year skid for most internet companies, the site reinvented itself as Ask.com, and Jeeves, we were told, was retired.
As of May 1, 2026, Ask.com is just a message from parent company IAC. “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com,” the message says in part.
It ends, “Jeeves’ spirit endures,” and I find this part ominous.
Not to be mean, but let’s all hope Jeeves’ spirit does not endure. Let’s let this one recede into the fog of 90s nostalgia and never come back. The whole idea behind AskJeeves was that it was essentially a natural language chatbot. Then along came SmarterChild, the AIM chatbot, which ended up being more fun than AskJeeves, and that was the last time anyone had any innocent fun with a chatbot.
P.G. 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 fire up Claude, tell it to pretend it’s Jeeves, and ask it a question.
There you go. That’s what it would be like if Jeeve’s spirit endured into the present in the form of an AI chatbot. It would be kinda cute for a second—”wow, he tells you the actual weather like Jeeves haha!” Then it starts to feel empty and gross after two seconds. And if you take it any further than that, it starts getting dark.
I hope by pointing out this possibility, I have made the idea dissipate into nothingness rather than manifesting it. Rest in peace—forever—Jeeves.
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