East Bay internet pioneer Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, shuts down

Early internet search engine Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, shut down Friday.

The company was originally named for its mascot, a besuited cartoon search valet named Jeeves. It was founded by David Warthen and Garrett Gruener in Berkeley in 1996, two years before Google was formed. It grew to around 700 employees and was later headquartered in Emeryville and, after surviving the dot-com crash, Oakland in 2004.

Media executive Barry Diller’s IAC Inc. bought the company in 2005 and soon dropped the Jeeves persona.

“Every great search must come to an end. As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com,” the company posted on the now defunct Ask.com website. “To the millions who asked … We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you — the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world — thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust. Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

Ask.com’s search engine was long overshadowed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing, and by 2010 it had outsourced its search technology. But Jeeves’ conversational approach toward questions and answers is now seen as a precursor to today’s artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT.

The askjeeves.com domain was still active as of Saturday, but searches only returned results from other IAC-owned websites.

Jeeves was named after a fictional character in P. G. Wodehouse novels first published in 1915. His image was revived from 2009 to 2016 in the United Kingdom version of Ask.com.