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TechRadar
TechRadar
David Nield

Ask Jeeves quietly shuts down after nearly three decades, after pioneering conversational web search long before ChatGPT and Gemini

Ask Jeeves / Ask.com search engine.
  • Ask Jeeves has closed after almost 30 years
  • It pioneered natural language web searches
  • Today, ChatGPT and Gemini work in similar ways

With AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini available, it's now easy to run web searches like "what are the best sights in Rome?" or "how do you fix a leaky shower?", but this natural language format was actually pioneered almost 30 years ago — and by a search portal that just closed down.

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