What is on Ask.com now?
A goodbye note. Ask.com stopped answering questions on May 1, 2026, and the address now serves a farewell page that opens with one line: "Every great search must come to an end."
IAC, the New York holding company that had owned the site since 2005, gave the reason in a single sentence: "As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com." The shutdown took the rest of IAC's Ask Media Group with it, including Reference.com, ConsumerSearch.com and Shopping.net.
The closure ended a longer fiction. Ask.com had not run a search engine of its own since 2010. For its last sixteen years it was a front end, renting web results and paid listings from somebody else while the brand coasted on a butler most of its visitors had never seen.
Who owns Ask Jeeves today?
IAC still owns the name. It bought Ask Jeeves in July 2005 for $1.85 billion and ran the site through a division called Ask Media Group until May 2026, so the brand has an owner but no product behind it.
IAC is out of search and has said so in public. Barry Diller's April 2026 letter to shareholders put the company's future on its People Inc. publishing business and its stake in MGM Resorts, not on answering questions.
There is also no successor to redirect the traffic to. When Yahoo closed AltaVista in 2013 it pushed visitors to its own results page. IAC had nowhere to push Ask.com's visitors, because it was closing Excite and the rest of the group in the same retreat.
Who founded Ask Jeeves, and when did it launch?
Garrett Gruener, a venture capitalist, and David Warthen, a software developer, started the company in Berkeley, California, in 1996. The service went into beta in April 1997 and opened fully on June 1, 1997, more than a year before Google was incorporated.
The pitch was one sentence long: type your question the way you would say it out loud, and a cartoon butler goes and finds the answer. The name came from the unflappable valet in P.G. Wodehouse's comic novels, a character built entirely around knowing things his employer did not.
Underneath, it was less magic than staffing. Human editors mapped common questions to good pages, the software matched your phrasing against those templates, and anything it could not match fell through to an ordinary keyword search. That was still a mercy in 1997, when rival engines expected you to know Boolean operators to get a usable result.
It worked. Ask Jeeves was handling about 300,000 searches a day in October 1998, a million a day by May 1999 and two million a day by October 1999.
What happened to the Jeeves butler?
IAC retired him in February 2006, when it renamed the site Ask.com. The reasoning was that a cartoon servant made the product look like a toy next to Google's blank white page.
He had reached further than most search mascots before that. The Jeeves balloon flew in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York from 2000 through 2004, a year after the company put a float in the 1999 parade.
He came back once. In April 2009 Ask brought him out of retirement for the United Kingdom site as a redesigned computer-animated character, citing user demand and research from YouGov that found more British respondents recognized the Ask Jeeves name than understood what Ask.com did. The revival faded, and he stayed gone.
The farewell page in 2026 gave him a last line, saying "Jeeves' spirit endures." With the search business closed, there is no product left for him to front.
Why did Ask Jeeves lose to Google?
Not for lack of money at the start. Ask Jeeves sold 3,000,000 shares at $14.00 each in a prospectus dated June 30, 1999, and the stock closed its first day of trading on July 1, 1999 at 64 and 15/16, up 364 percent. It traded on the NASDAQ as ASKJ until the ticker was retired in the IAC deal six years later.
It also bought real technology. On September 18, 2001 it acquired Teoma for more than $1.5 million, which gave it a crawler and a ranking system of its own instead of a licensed index and a file of scripted answers. That is what IAC paid $1.85 billion for in 2005.
Scale is what beat it. Crawling and indexing the whole web cost more every year, and Ask was paying that bill out of a much smaller advertising business than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. On November 9, 2010 it quit algorithmic search, cut 130 engineers in Edison, New Jersey and Hangzhou, China, and handed its web results to an outside supplier. Ask held roughly 2 percent of United States search at the time. Google held about 65 percent.
Barry Diller, who in 2005 had argued that several search companies could thrive at once, gave the blunt version in 2010: "We've realized in the last few years you can't compete head on with Google."
Why Google's own money ended Ask.com in 2026
Ask.com spent its last decade living on a contract with the company that had beaten it. Under a services agreement signed in October 2015, Google supplied most of the paid listings shown on Ask Media Group's pages. IAC's annual report for 2025 put the figure at $210.7 million of revenue in that year, about 99 percent of everything IAC's Search segment earned.
Google gave notice in December 2025 that it would not renew. The same annual report stated that the services agreement "expires by its terms on March 31, 2026." Ask.com closed a month after that date, which is the shortest explanation anyone needs for the timing.
The pivot that was supposed to save it never did. Ask.com had spent years as a question and answer site rather than a search engine, in the same stretch that Yahoo Answers was fading, and a decade of Google algorithm updates kept cutting the traffic that kind of page depends on.
The natural-language idea itself was never the problem. Typing a full question and getting a written answer is now the default behavior of every AI assistant on the market. Ask Jeeves was doing it in 1997 with human editors and pattern matching, and it never found a way to make that pay for a web-sized index.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns Ask Jeeves now?
IAC has owned the Ask Jeeves brand since July 2005, when it paid $1.85 billion for the company and later ran the site as Ask.com through its Ask Media Group division. IAC discontinued its entire search business in 2026 and closed Ask.com on May 1 of that year, so the name has an owner but no working service.
Why did Ask Jeeves fail?
Ask Jeeves could not pay for a web-scale index out of a small advertising business, and it gave up building its own search engine on November 9, 2010, cutting 130 engineers and renting results instead. By then Ask held about 2 percent of United States search against roughly 65 percent for Google, and the Ask.com site that remained closed on May 1, 2026.
Who founded Ask Jeeves and when did it start?
Garrett Gruener and David Warthen founded Ask Jeeves in Berkeley, California, in 1996, and named the butler after the valet in P.G. Wodehouse's novels. The question service ran in beta from April 1997 and launched fully on June 1, 1997, two years before the company went public on the NASDAQ at $14.00 a share.