Ask.com, the search engine that began as Ask Jeeves, has closed its doors. Parent company IAC has shut down its research activities as part of an ongoing effort to refocus its operations.
A farewell message published on the Ask.com home page, reads:
“All great search must end. As IAC continues to focus, we have made the decision to end our search operations, which include Ask.com.”
The message thanked the engineers, designers, and teams who built the platform over the decades, as well as the users who relied on it. It ended with a short sentence: “The spirit of Jeeves lives on.” »
What Ask Jeeves Was
For anyone who tuned in after about 2005, Ask Jeeves may just be a name. But for users who first discovered the Web in the late 1990s, Jeeves represented something new.
Garrett Gruener and David Warthen founded the company in Berkeley, California, in 1996. The service publicly launched under the name AskJeeves.com and introduced an idea that seemed strange at the time.
Instead of entering keywords like all other search engines expected, Jeeves encouraged users to enter a complete question in plain English. The search engine would try to return a direct answer.
The mascot, a cartoon butler named after the fictional valet of The novels of PG Wodehousebecame one of the most recognizable characters of the early Internet. Jeeves made search accessible when the Web was still intimidating to millions of new users. Jeeves also dabbled in mainstream advertising, including appearances tied to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Ask Jeeves became public in 1999riding the dot-com boom. At this point, the search engine was already process more than a million requests per day. It competed alongside Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite and Lycos in a search market that had not yet consolidated around a single winner.
The rise of Google has changed the market.
The long decline
Google’s PageRank algorithm delivered better results faster, and users noticed. Ask Jeeves tried to keep up. In 2001, the company acquired Teomaa search technology company with its own way of ranking credibility. The Teoma engine powered Ask’s organic results and earned the respect of search professionals for its quality.
But the gap continued to widen. IAC acquired Ask Jeeves in 2005 and quickly dropped “Jeeves” from the name. The name change to Ask.com was intended to modernize the product and position it for broader competition.
It didn’t work. In 2010, Barry Diller told TechCrunch Disrupt that Ask.com could not compete with Google and had no value in IAC stock. The same year, Ask.com stop your own web crawler and laid off much of its engineering staff. Basic search functions have been outsourced to third-party providers. The company has moved towards a question-and-answer community model.
It kept the lights on for another 16 years, but Ask was never more relevant again.
SEJ was there
Search Engine Journal covered Ask Jeeves extensively during its peak years.
Loren Baker, founder of SEJ reported in 2005 about the company’s plans to launch a paid search advertising platform to rival Google and Yahoo. He covered the name change rumors when Diller first floated the idea of dropping the Jeeves name. He followed the Acquisitions of iWon and Excite this briefly doubled Ask Jeeves’ market share.
These articles are now a time capsule from the days when research was still a multi-player race.
Why it matters
Ask Jeeves pioneered asking questions in their own words, but the rise of Google made keyword searching a norm. Now natural language search is central again, with Google’s AI capabilities based on Jeeves’ original principle of asking questions in plain language.
Looking to the future
IAC’s farewell message gave no indication of plans for the Ask.com domain or associated properties. The closure appears to end IAC’s consumer search business under the Ask brand.
For the search industry, the shutdown is a reminder of how quickly the market consolidated after Google’s rise. Among the best-known consumer search brands of this period, Google is the one that emerged with an independent global search engine.
Featured Image: see the picture/Shutterstock
