Its kind of sad honestly. a lot of people worked there and built something that meant something at the time. But technology moves fast and if the product doesn't evolve with it eventually people just stop showing up. The internet looks completely different than it did when ask.com launched, hard to survive that long without building toward what people actually need now.

Cairn_Shadow

Another one of those late 1990s tools we all used on the Internet formally died yesterday. Ask.com, like Alta Vista search engine and so many other early Internet tools has gone to digital heaven. It's crazy weird to see these things phase out after having seen them at the beginning of the widespread internet in the first place, but it's also amazing Ask.com lasted as long as it did too. I think the final nail in the coffin was AI, since the premise of Ask.com was being able to ask it a question and get a response back.