A notice on the site said the IAC-owned service officially shut on 1 May 2026 as the company sharpened its focus.
Launched as Ask Jeeves in 1996, it was an early natural-language question-and-answer search engine but spent most of its history overshadowed by Google.
IAC bought the company in 2005, dropped the Jeeves name and scaled back search by 2010, when Barry Diller said it was not competitive or reflected in IAC's valuation.
Did IAC wisely abandon a dying search engine, or did it miss the chance to resurrect Jeeves as a leading AI assistant?
As AI makes clicking links obsolete, how will online publishers and creators survive the inevitable collapse of search traffic?
The original answer engine is dead. In an AI-dominated world, who becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth online?