Google · Tom's Hardware
After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,” Ask writes
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Tom's Hardware is deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades.
Key facts
- After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,” Ask writes
- Unfortunately, its parent company, IAC, has announced that it’s changing its focus and will retire Ask.com, the successor to AskJeeves.com, after 30 years of service
- Ask Jeeves is following in the footsteps of Alta Vista, another ‘90s search engine that fell victim to Google’s groundbreaking PageRank algorithm
- Nevertheless, this might be a fitting retirement for the search engine valet, after 30 years of serving up answers online, it’s time for it to rest and ride off into the sunset
Summary
If you were one of the people who went online during the mid-90s, you didn’t rely on Google if you wanted to find anything across the wild west of the internet. When you visit Ask.com, you can read the company’s final statement: “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026,” Ask writes. Despite being older than Google by a couple of years, Ask Jeeves wasn’t able to compete against it or Yahoo!, which soon became staples of internet search in the 2000s. One thing that made Ask Jeeves stand out from the competition was that it allowed users to search using natural language queries, i.e., asking it questions like you’re talking to another person instead of using keywords and Boolean operators. But it seems that IAC is no longer interested in keeping Ask.