AllExperts

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

~ the obituary ~

AllExperts was one of those sites that surfaced in an english search result, gave you an answer, and then dropped out of your memory until the next time. I was online from 1998, searching in two languages, and sites like this were the connective tissue of the pre-forum web for anyone hunting a specific answer. I never had an account. I did land on its pages more than once without ever thinking about who ran it.

It launched in 1998 as an ask-an-expert service, and the model was refreshingly human. You posted a question in a category, and a volunteer who had signed up as an expert in that topic answered it, for free, because they wanted to. Over more than nineteen years it collected millions of questions and answers, which made it one of the oldest and largest Q&A archives on the web. About.com owned it for most of that run.

The end came on 24 april 2017, quietly and from above. About.com was rebranding into Dotdash and splitting itself into cleaner niche sites, and the sprawling volunteer Q&A archive did not fit the new shape. Experts got a short notice and nothing more. Nineteen years of hand-written answers went dark not because people stopped asking, but because the owner decided the format no longer paid. From where i sat it was less a place i mourned than a piece of the old web i noticed was missing.

~ the case file ~

~ what the format was ~

Before search got good and before forums took over, ask-an-expert sites were how you reached a person who actually knew. AllExperts leaned all the way into that. Real volunteers signed up by subject and answered strangers for nothing but the small satisfaction of being useful. It was slow and personal in a way the modern answer box is not, and it predated Yahoo Answers by years.

~ why it did not last ~

The volunteer model that made it special also made it fragile. It depended on experts showing up out of goodwill, and it sat inside a company whose priorities were not its own. When About.com became Dotdash and chased a portfolio of tidy vertical sites, a nineteen-year Q&A sprawl was overhead rather than an asset. The knowledge did not fail. The business around it changed its mind.

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