How Ask Jeeves blew it

"Ask Jeeves debuted in 1997, a moment of great expectations for the nascent field of internet search. As the web exploded with content, Ask Jeeves was one of a bevy of startups that emerged to organize it. Yahoo and AltaVista were the big dogs, but others included Excite, Lycos, HotBot, LookSmart, Northern Light, and WebCrawler."

"In November 2010, IAC gave up on Ask being a general-purpose search engine and turned it into a user-generated Q&A site. At some point in between those two moments, Ask had morphed into a bottom-feeding portal for articles so out of date that "10 Best Documentaries of 2022-So Far" was one of the headlines on its homepage when IAC pulled the plug."

"For years, I wrote about Ask quite regularly. But when its owner, media conglomerate IAC (which is in the process of changing its own name to People Inc.), announced it had shut down the site as of May 1, it was its first time in the news in more than 15 years. The last time before that was in November 2010, when IAC gave up on Ask being a general-purpose search engine and turned it into a user-generated Q&A site."

"Meanwhile, a couple of Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were working on their own search algorithm. When Google launched in 2008, its results were clearly the best in the business, and its ascent was rapid. In 2001, Ask Jee"

Ask Jeeves debuted in 1997 during early internet search growth. It emerged alongside other startups aiming to organize rapidly expanding web content. Over time, Ask shifted away from being a general-purpose search engine and became a user-generated Q&A site. Later, it functioned as a portal for outdated articles, with irrelevant headlines appearing on its homepage. IAC announced the shutdown of Ask.com effective May 1, ending a long period of low prominence. The shutdown triggered nostalgia for the original brand and mascot, reflecting that the service once had meaningful potential but failed to capitalize on it before losing momentum to better-performing search engines like Google.

Read at Fast Company