Ask.com has closed

Early role and perceived quality

• Ask Jeeves launched in the late 1990s as a natural-language Q&A search engine, seen by some as “ahead of its time” relative to today’s conversational AI.
• Several commenters recall it being genuinely useful between roughly 1997–2000, often used alongside AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, HotBot, MetaCrawler, Dogpile, etc.
• Others say it never really worked as advertised, was weaker than competitors, and survived mostly on its quirky butler persona and memorable URL.

Curation, internals, and company culture

• Early answers were often hand-curated by editorial staff who researched topics and even evaluated adult content to route queries appropriately.
• Editors reportedly used Google themselves to find high-quality sources.
• Former employees describe the broader company culture as highly political and unpleasant, though they also remember talented colleagues and interesting technical work.
• A subsystem (Teoma) is mentioned, but commenters say the codebase no longer exists and was effectively abandoned.

Reputation damage: toolbars and ad practices

• Many associate Ask primarily with unwanted browser toolbars bundled with installers (e.g., via major software vendors), describing them as near‑malware and difficult to remove.
• Ask’s search pages later became heavily ad-driven and often just surfaced content from sites it owned.
• Technical anecdotes describe Ask arbitraging Google/Yahoo ads via a third-party ad server, with strict latency constraints and colocated infrastructure.

Search nostalgia and broader ecosystem

• Thread contains extensive nostalgia for pre‑Google engines, especially AltaVista’s powerful Boolean operators, phrase and proximity searches, and clustering/visualization features.
• Several argue older engines once delivered more controllable or relevant results than modern Google, while others push back on claims that they were “better.”
• There is broad frustration with modern search being “enshittified,” dominated by ads, SEO spam, and limited to “approved” sources; Kagi and Brave are mentioned as more promising alternatives.

Missed AI/branding opportunity and future of ask.com

• Many see shutting down now as ironic: the original “Ask Jeeves” premise finally matches current LLM capabilities.
• Commenters suggest repurposing ask.com as an AI assistant, selling the high‑value domain to an AI lab, or expect it to reappear under new ownership.
• Reactions range from genuine sadness and nostalgia to “good riddance” from those burned by toolbars and junk results.