ask.comwhich was called AskJeeves until twenty years agoit no longer exists.
You can tell someone didn’t really use the Internet in the ’90s if they say AskJeeves was a big part of online life back then. I have long suspected that AltaVista, The search colossus in the era before Google.has run out of memory because it looks vaguely like “AskJeeves” if you squint.
Anyway, AskJeeves was pretty funny, because people were like, “Internet? I’ve seen jokes about it on hit TV shows like Mad About You, but I don’t know what it is.” And you’d say, “Oh, you’re missing out! Look, it has a butler who answers questions!”
And if the question was “What time is it?” or “How many cups are in a gallon?” the little Jeeves cartoon would give him a believable answer. But most of the questions did not produce anything good. The Internet didn’t work for this kind of thing yet, so most queries just generated a boring page of search results. And once the demo was over and you really wanted to read a Babylon 5 episode guide or something, you’d go back to AltaVista.
After the dot-com bubble and multi-year downturn for most Internet companies, the site reinvented itself as ask.comand Jeeves, we were told, was retired.
Starting May 1, 2026, ask.com It’s just a message from the parent company IAC. “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes ask.com”the message says in part.
He ends by saying, “The spirit of Jeeves lives on,” and I find this part ominous.
I don’t want to be mean, but let’s hope the spirit of Jeeves can’t stand it. Let this one recede into the fog of ’90s nostalgia and never return. The idea behind AskJeeves was that it was essentially a natural language chatbot. Then AIM’s chatbot SmarterChild came along, which ended up being more fun than AskJeeves, and that was the last time anyone had innocent fun with a chatbot.
PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a public domain character, and if you want to know what it would be like to interact with Jeeves as a modern chatbot, simply turn on Claude, tell him to pretend to be Jeeves, and ask him a question.
There you go. This is what it would be like if the spirit of Jeeve lived on to the present in the form of an AI chatbot. It would be kind of cute for a second: “Wow, it tells you the real weather like Jeeves, haha!” Then it starts to feel empty and gross after two seconds. And if you go further, it starts to get dark.
I hope that by pointing out this possibility I have made the idea dissipate into nothingness instead of manifesting it. Rest in peace-forever-Jeeves.
