AskKids

» see askkids.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The kid-safe search engine was an American school-and-library product. It existed because school districts there had filtering policies with budgets attached to them, and because American parents in 1998 were being told weekly that the web was a place their children should not be alone in. Nothing like that institutional pressure existed where I was, so the entire category arrived in my life as a thing other countries were busy doing.

Ask Jeeves had launched in June 1997 on a single idea: you type a question in plain language and a butler answers it. In March 1998 the company pointed the same machinery at children and put it at ajkids.com. The answers came from a curated base rather than a crawler, which is the one thing that made a children's version possible at all. You cannot hand-check an index.

The company's 1999 registration statement is unusually direct about how much it mattered to them. Ask Jeeves for Kids, it says, at AJKIDS.COM, is "our flagship channel." It goes on: "A special editorial team ensures that all answers are appropriate for children." That editorial layer sat on top of a commercial blocklist, SurfWatch first and CyberPatrol later, so a question got filtered twice before a child saw a result.

It ran for fifteen years under three names and ended with none of the ceremony its launch had. No farewell page went up. No press release went out. The domain simply started pointing somewhere else one week in early 2013, and the thing it had been pointing at was gone.

~ the case file ~

~ the names it went by ~

Ask Jeeves for Kids was the name for eight years. In 2006 the parent company retired the butler and rebranded itself Ask.com, and the children's site lost its mascot in the same sweep and became Ask for Kids. In 2008 it tightened again to AskKids. Three brands over one product, with the natural-language promise dropping a little further out of the name each time.

The 2006 change is the one that cost something real. The butler was the whole pitch to a child: a person you ask, who answers. Ask for Kids is a description of a service. AskKids is a URL with the space taken out.

~ the quiet redirect ~

The archive dates it to within five days. On 25 February 2013 www.askkids.com still returned the real homepage, a 34 KB page titled Ask Kids with a working search box on it. By 2 March the bare domain was answering with a 301 to www.ask.com, and by 5 March the www host was doing the same. It was not shut down in any announced sense. It was redirected. That is the ending for a property nobody is prepared to defend and nobody is willing to formally bury.

~ what the file paths remember ~

Context for the timing sits two years earlier. In November 2010 Ask.com gave up on algorithmic search entirely and cut the engineering staff behind it. What was left ran on question-and-answer over licensed results. Once the parent has stopped trying to be a search engine, the children's version is running on inertia.

The last working page gives away how long nobody had looked. Every image on it was served from a directory called /i/askforkids/, the 2006 brand name, still sitting in the asset paths five years after the site had been renamed AskKids on every visible surface. The logo was a CSS background on a div rather than an image tag, which is how I got it back: the stylesheet remembered a file called logo.png at an address that stopped resolving a decade ago.

What the archive hands over is a red oval reading Ask in white, with Kids written beside it in loose pink marker script, a trademark symbol tucked in the corner. The notebook-paper background and the pencil cursor are still in the same folder. Somebody designed all of that for children who are now in their thirties. Nobody changed it again for five years, and in the first days of March 2013 the address started answering for ask.com instead.

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