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Popular 90s search engine ‘Ask Jeeves’ finally bites the dust — parent company shutters website that pioneered natural language queries, only a placeholder results page remains

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(Image credit: Getty Images) 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. Instead, you may have visited a distinguished gentleman wearing a suit named Jeeves to guide you in the chaotic land that was known as the “information superhighway.” The page, Ask Jeeves, wasn’t just an early search engine — it was also a precursor to the AI chatbots we know today with its goal of answering users’ questions through natural language processing. 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. 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.…

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