In the digital wilderness of Y2K, we came to him with our most pressing questions.
He told us about Britney Spears, Tamagotchi, former President George W. Bush and Beanie Babies. We asked and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online butler who led us into the depths of cyberspace.
Now, like so many other relics of yesterday’s Internet, Jeeves — and its home, Ask.com — are gone. After nearly 30 years, the question-and-answer service and former search engine closed on Friday.
“To you — the millions of users who have turned to us for answers in a fast-changing world — we thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty and your trust,” the company said in an announcement posted on now defunct website.
The death of Ask.com is perhaps a Rorschach test for our current digital crossroads: evidence of the Internet’s inexorable change-or-die law, or the decline of a simpler digital age.
Before Claude Code, Grok and Gemini, there was Jeeves in a modest suit for everyone. We conversed with him in full sentences and asked him full questions. We knew him. We trusted him.
Created in Berkeley, California during the dot-com gold rush, Ask Jeeves first appeared on computer screens in 1996.
The pioneering, quirky question-and-answer search engine was the brainchild of founders David Warthen and Garrett Gruener. Their mascot, Jeeves, was modeled after the clever English butler character from the famous PG Wodehouse book series. Its search function was simple – type in a question and get an answer.
But the quality of its answers was uneven, and the site quickly eclipsed Google and Yahoo as the world’s search engine.
The site was purchased by InterActive Corp. for more than $1 billion in 2005 and was given a cash injection to help it compete as a search engine.
It was renamed Ask.com, and as part of a 2006 redesign, the site also got rid of the Jeeves character. The scrappy but resourceful site was one of the first to introduce hyperlocal overlay maps to its searches and incorporate website thumbnails.
“They’re doing a lot of smart and interesting things,” a Google executive commented on Ask.com at the time.
Still, Ask.com struggled to compete and returned to its bread and butter in 2010: question and answer style challenges.
Even then, it faltered against newer, crowdsourced iterations like Quora and Google’s relentless march to the forefront of the Internet—the platform now dominates search traffic and the global Internet experience.
“As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have decided to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com,” InterActive Corp. said in a statement. on Ask.com.
Still, Jeeves and his politer, classier brand of cyberspace lives on, if only in Generation Z’s nostalgia for simpler digital times.
In the pantheon of millennial touchstones, it sits somewhere between AOL Instant Messenger and Limewire, gone from our screens but forever in our Wayback machines. (By Sunday, many of the archived Ask.com websites were no longer available.)
