• Ask Jeeves has closed after almost 30 years
• It pioneered natural language web searches
• Today, ChatGPT and Gemini work in similar ways

With AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini available, it's now easy to run web searches like "what are the best sights in Rome?" or "how do you fix a leaky shower?", but this natural language format was actually pioneered almost 30 years ago — and by a search portal that just closed down.

The portal was Ask Jeeves, later rebranded to Ask.com, and it opened fully to the public on June 1, 1997. As XDA Developers reports, what remained of Ask.com has now been shuttered by its current owner, InterActiveCorp (IAC).

If you were online just as the internet was taking off, you'll remember Ask Jeeves and its eponymous butler character — named after the valet Jeeves in the PG Wodehouse stories. The idea was to ask questions and get answers from the growing amount of information on the web, not just look for topics like "sports" or "movies".

Article continues below

At the time that Ask Jeeves launched, Google was still a prototype university project, and it offered something genuinely different to the search engines and web directories of the time (including Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos).

'Deeply grateful'

Google of course entirely changed the web search landscape, and after its initial success, Ask Jeeves struggled. It was renamed Ask.com in February 2006 as Jeeves was removed from the search portal, although the butler character did reappear on the UK version of the site between 2009 and 2016.

IAC took over operations in 2005, and has now made the decision to close the search engine down to "sharpen its focus" on other areas. The official end date for Ask Jeeves and Ask.com was May 1, 2026.

"We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades," says IAC. "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. Jeeves' spirit endures."

It's interesting that as Google and other AI-led companies try and make web search like a natural conversation again, the site that first pioneered the approach is closing. Ask Jeeves really was ahead of its time, back in 1997.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.