The early era of the World Wide Web continues to fade. On May 1, 2026, the digital landscape bid farewell to Ask.com, the search engine famously launched in the late 1990s as Ask Jeeves. In shutting down the service, the parent company, IAC, noted:

“As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com.”

While the announcement explicitly names Ask.com, the phrase “discontinue our search business” is a broad umbrella. It strongly suggests that other legacy search and portal properties under the IAC wing are next on the corporate chopping block. Chief among those vulnerable remnants is Excite.com.

For many web users, Excite.com is a forgotten relic of the early dot-com boom. However, the site has quietly survived in a highly diminished form for decades. Today, Excite is operated by Ask Applications (part of the Ask Media Group), which is a subsidiary of IAC. Because Excite is most certainly a search portal (despite everything), IAC’s strategic decision to exit the search sector leaves the continued existence of Excite.com in a precarious position. As IAC redirects its resources toward future growth the fact that Jeeves, despite maintaining some semblance of a healthy clip of traffic at around 13 million monthly visits in April, has been executed, shows that certainly maintaining a low-traffic portal like Excite.com no longer aligns with the company’s general point of view. We advise that butlers should not approach IAC corporate restructuring meetings, given what already happened last month.

If Excite.com is indeed next to go, it will mark the final chapter of one of the internet’s most fascinating historical narratives. Launched in 1995, Excite was once a titan of the early web. By 1997, it was the sixth most visited website in the world, competing directly with Yahoo and AOL. Excite is also famously remembered for what is widely considered one of the most infamous missed opportunities in tech history. In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell their nascent search engine, Google, to Excite for $750,000. Excite’s then-CEO, George Bell, turned down the offer. Following the dot-com crash, Excite@Home, having perhaps unwisely done a mega-merger with internet provider At Home, filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The portal’s assets, described as by-gone in 2001, were sold off for a fraction of their peak value, eventually finding their way to Ask Jeeves and, ultimately, to IAC.

Today, Excite.com is a shell of its former self, serving primarily as a basic directory of hyperlinks and outsourced search features, their Finance menu redirecting to Yahoo finance, their news tab to Bing, and so on. Somehow, despite all this and decades of decline, inexplicably they continue to draw users. Similarweb estimates that even five years after pulling out of email, 190,800 visits were made across the month of May. Somewhat predictably, per Similarweb around 17% of the userbase is over 65, 24% are between 55 and 64, and 19% are between 45 and 54, respectively. Despite this zombie dynamics, by pulling the plug on Ask.com, IAC has signaled the end of its willingness to subsidize legacy portals. Indeed one can imagine one of the sole reasons the site is still up is that someone genuinely forgot to turn it off or make an internal memo about it. Despite this seeming reprieve, with the parent company officially exiting the search sector the clock certainly is ticking for Excite.com.