Aport

» see aport.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Russia is one of the few countries where the local search engine beat Google outright, and that fact tends to get told as a story about Yandex. It leaves out the part where Yandex had to beat somebody at home first. Aport was one of the two it had to get past.

It came out of Agama, a Moscow software company, and was shown publicly in February 1996 while it could still only search one server. The real launch was 11 November 1997, by which point it was indexing the Russian web as a whole. Cyrillic search was not a solved problem. Russian is heavily inflected, so a word can appear in a dozen written forms, and an engine that treats those as separate strings is useless. The three Russian engines of that era all had to build morphological analysis before they could build a search box, which is why none of the American ones ever seriously competed there.

The Runet was a genuinely parallel internet and I never saw any of it. That is not a regional excuse about Turkey being far from things, because Turkey is not far from Russia. It is an alphabet. A search engine is the one product you cannot use through a language you do not read, since the whole interaction is typing a word and judging what comes back. For me the entire Russian web was a set of domains that appeared in link lists and never resolved into anything.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Aport peaked around the turn of the century, which was also the moment Russian internet assets briefly commanded American prices. Golden Telecom bought it in 2000 in a deal valuing the search engine at 25 million dollars, and it was folded into the ROL portal, where it did the thing portals did with search: sat in the corner of a page full of news and mail, providing a box.

That placement is probably what killed it. Yandex spent those years being a search engine that happened to have a portal attached. Aport spent them being a portal feature. When the two products diverged, the one built around the index kept getting better at the index, and the one built around the page kept getting better at the page.

~ the markdown ~

In August 2011 Aport gave up and switched to Yandex search technology underneath its own interface. That is the moment worth marking, whatever the corporate paperwork says afterward. A search engine that queries a competitor's index is a skin.

In the summer of 2012 VimpelCom sold the whole thing to a private buyer for 150,000 dollars. Set that next to the 25 million from 2000 and the ratio is about 170 to one. The search was disabled entirely and the site was rebuilt as a shopping price comparison covering 76 Russian cities, which is a reasonable second life for a domain people still typed out of habit.

~ the long tail ~

The shopping version ran for a while and then stopped mattering, and by the middle of the 2020s aport.ru was not answering at all. There was no announcement. A domain that had been one of three answers to the question of how you find anything in Russian simply stopped resolving, some years after the last person who would have noticed had already moved on.

What Aport is useful for now is the reminder that the search wars were fought separately in every writing system, and mostly finished before the rest of us learned the names of the losers. Every country that ended up with a domestic search engine has two or three graves like this behind it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »