Ask.comIt was called AskJeeves until twenty years agono more.
To say that AskJeeves was a big part of online life back then, you can tell that someone didn’t really use the internet in the 90s. I have long suspected that AltaVista, The giant of search in the days before Googleif you squint, it looks vaguely like “AskJeeves” so it’s memory-dumped.
Anyway, AskJeeves was kind of fun because people were like, “The Internet? I’ve seen him make jokes on popular TV shows like Mad About You, but I don’t know what that is.” And you’re like, “Oh, you’re running! Look, he’s got a butler to answer questions!”
And if the question is “what time is it?” or “How many cups are in a gallon?” little cartoon Jeeves will give you a reliable answer. But most of the questions didn’t do anything good. The internet didn’t work for such things yet, so most queries just produced a boring page of search results. And when the demo is over and you actually want to read a Babylon 5 episode guide or something, you’ll be back to AltaVista.
After the dot com bubble and a multi-year slide for most internet companies, the site reinvented itself. Ask.comand Jeeves, we are told, retired.
By May 1, 2026 Ask.com only a message from parent company IAC. “As IAC continues to increase its focus, we have decided to discontinue our search business. Ask.com“, – says a part of the message.
It ends “The spirit of Jeves endures” and I consider this part a failure.
Not to be mean, but let’s hope for Jeeves’s spirit does not tolerate. Let this 90s nostalgia fade away and never come back. The whole idea behind AskJeeves was that it was essentially a natural language chatbot. Then came SmarterChild, an AIM chatbot even more fun than AskJeeves, and that was the last time anyone had innocent fun with a chatbot.
PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a social character, and if you want to know what it would be like to interact with Jeeves as a modern chatbot, just turn on Claude, tell him to pretend he’s Jeeves, and ask him a question.
Come on. This is what it would be like if Jeeve’s soul survived the present in the form of an AI chatbot. It would be cute for a second – “wow, he tells you the real weather like Jeeves haha!” Then after two seconds it starts to feel empty and rough. And if you take it further, it starts to get darker.
I hope that by pointing out this possibility I have forced the idea to fade into nothingness rather than manifest it. sleep well –forever –Jeeves.
