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Funded in 1996 in Berkeley, California, by David Warthen, who had founded EyeGames - a children's video game company, and Garrett Gruener, a venture capitalist, Ask.com is now a business division of IAC Search & Media. It was originally implemented by Gary Chevsky.

Ask.com is not its very first name; instead, it was called "Ask Jeeves" at the very beginning. "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman" or valet, based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from P. G. Wodehouse's work.

In April 1997, Ask Jeeves was launched as a natural language search engine.
In February 1998, Ask Jeeves for Kids (AJKids.com) was released.
In 1999, Ask Jeeves's revenues increased exponentially and completed its initial public offering of stock.
In February 2000, Ask Jeeves acquired Direct Hit Technologies, Inc., a company whose technology aggregated and organized online content.
In September 2001, Ask Jeeves purchased a Piscataway, New Jersey-based company named Teoma Technologies, Inc., who focused on creating a mathematically based solution that could produce the most relevant search results, an acquisition that was credited with injecting new life into Ask Jeeves. At the time the acquisition was completed, Ask Jeeves ranked as the 17th most visited web property, receiving more than 14 million unique visitors a month.
On March 4, 2004, Ask Jeeves agreed to acquire Interactive Search Holdings, one of the largest privately held online search and media companies, for 9.3 million shares of common stock and options and pay $150 million in cash.
On March 21, 2005, Media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp agreed to acquire Ask Jeeves for 1.85 billion dollars.
On September 23, 2005, the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves in a humorous way, with the engine saying he was retiring.
On February 27, 2006, the new disassociated name "Ask.com" came out, also a rebirth of it.
In June 2007, Ask launched "Ask3D", with which users could customize their search, something similar as Google's Universal Search concept.
In December 2007, "AskEraser "was released, which allows users to opt-out from tracking of search queries and IP and cookie values.
On 4 July 2008, Ask.com announced the acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

Today, Ask.com sites include Ask.com U.S. (www.Ask.com), Ask.com Deutschland, Ask.com Espana, Ask.com France, Ask.com Italia, Ask.com Japan, Ask.com Nederland and Ask.com UK.
Ask.com brands also include Ask.com Mobile, Ask for Kids (www.askforkids.com) and Bloglines (www.bloglines.com.). It's definitely one of the leading search engines on the Web.

For more details for the development of Ask.com, please visit its Fact Sheet

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