Arabul

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

~ the obituary ~

Arabul rewrote its own title tag five times in twenty-five years and the sequence is most of the story. In December 1998 it read AraBuL, over a search box with two radio buttons: every word has to appear, or at least one word has to appear. By April 1999 it read Arabul - Kisisel Ana Sayfaniz, your personal home page, and the page under it had chat rooms and a poll asking visitors whether they liked the new layout better than the old one.

In August 2000 it read arabul - Internet'e baslangic noktaniz, your starting point to the internet, which is what every portal on the planet was calling itself that year. Then the ambition drained out. By March 2005 the title was just arabul.com. From 2008 onward it read Arabul Türkiye'nin kategorik indeksi, Turkey's categorical index, and it never changed again.

The 2000 front page signs itself Arabul A.Ş., all rights reserved. No source I could find names who started the company or who owned it at the end, which is its own small fact about Turkish web businesses of that vintage. The site outlasted every trace of the people who built it by about fifteen years.

What Arabul actually sold was a tree. Sixteen headings from Basın Yayın down to Turizm, each opening onto subcategories somebody had filled in by hand, plus the Büyükler İçin branch that every Turkish directory of the era carried and none of them discussed. The search box was on the page from the first capture to the last, but the tree sat in the middle, and the tree is what the site was still showing in 2023.

I was on a 33.6k modem in 1998 and a directory was the rational way to spend it. A query that came back with nothing still cost you the page load, and you were paying for that by the minute, so clicking down a list somebody had sorted in advance was the cheaper move. Turkish sites were the hard case anyway, because the engines that crawled the whole web crawled them badly, and a hand-sorted local list beat a bad global index here for years longer than it did anywhere else.

~ the case file ~

~ what a kategorik indeks was for ~

Directory work does not scale and everyone knew it by 2001, which is why Yahoo pushed its own directory behind a crawler and DMOZ ran on volunteer labor until it stopped. Arabul kept the tree at the center regardless. The 2008 layout had grown the tabs every search engine carried by then, images and news sitting next to the web, but the page below them was still a column of headings with three or four sample subcategories printed after each one.

The category names date the site to the month. Başvuru Kaynakları pointed at guides and dictionaries, because those were still places you went to a specific site for. Bölgesel opened onto local newspapers, from a period when a provincial paper having a website at all was worth cataloging. Bilgisayar ve İnternet led with games and hardware and then with Ücretsiz, free things, which was a heading of its own and tells you what people were mostly there to look for.

~ the shopping detour ~

In 2000 Arabul tried what every portal tried. That August the front page led with Arabul Alışveriş, a shopping search that worked by partnering with the Turkish e-commerce sites that existed, so you could hunt for a product rather than a page. Above it sat a link to Sınav Sonuçları, national exam results, which is the most Turkish thing a portal front page of that decade could possibly carry.

Neither one held. The shopping search needed merchants who were mostly not online yet and buyers holding a card, and in Turkey in 2000 that overlap was small enough to fit in a room. By 2005 the portal furniture was gone from the front page and Arabul was a list again.

~ the script that was still loading ~

The last full capture of arabul.com is 8 March 2023 and the markup is better reading than the page. At the bottom, inside an ASP.NET form, there is a script tag pointing at google-analytics.com/urchin.js with the account number UA-2898684-1 written out underneath it. Urchin was the tracker Google replaced in 2009 and switched off for good a few years after that. The front page of a Turkish search engine in 2023 was still asking a dead analytics service to please count the visit.

Higher up the same file there is a banner advertising flip-book software built in Flash. In the form action there is a session identifier of the kind ASP.NET hands out when it cannot set a cookie. The address returned a 500 on 28 March 2024 and has returned nothing at all since. The engine had stopped being an engine around 2008. The server took another fifteen years to find out.

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