Arianna

~ the obituary ~

Every country with its own language got one of these, and i used Turkey's. Arabul and Netbul were the boxes you typed into before Google was obviously better at Turkish than anything local was, and the same story ran in Italy with different names on it. Arianna is the Italian one. It has a better pedigree than most of them.

It went live in 1996 as the search side of Italia On Line, which was then the main Italian commercial web operation. The crawler and the indexing work came out of the computer science department at the University of Pisa, with the Pisa laboratory of Olivetti Telemedia working alongside it. Giuseppe Attardi was one of the three researchers behind it. The other two were Domenico Dato and Antonio Gulli.

The timing is what makes it worth remembering. In 1996 there was no Google, and the American engines handled accented languages badly when they handled them at all. An index built by people who spoke the language, running on hardware sitting in the country, was not a vanity project. It was the only way an Italian search result was going to be any good.

~ the case file ~

~ who owned it, in order ~

Italia On Line was bought by Infostrada in 1998. Infostrada was bought by Wind in 2002. Each sale moved Arianna one step further from the people who had written it and one step closer to being a feature of somebody's portal rather than a product with a name of its own.

Along the way it did the things portals did. Arianna Aziende arrived in 1997 as a business directory, with a shopping section called Cybermercato next to it. By 2000 there were separate searches for mp3s and for images, which was the standard answer to a web that had stopped being only text. From 2003 the brand stopped existing on its own and the box was called Libero Ricerca. In the same period the multimedia results were handed to FAST, the Norwegian engine, which is the moment the Italian index stopped being especially Italian.

~ the long tail ~

The people who built it did fine. Attardi stayed at Pisa as a professor in the department the crawler had come out of, and Dato ended up on the management side at Tiscali, which by then owned a good chunk of the Italian internet anyway. Gulli went to Microsoft and worked on Bing, which means one of the people who wrote Italy's first search engine spent the following decade attacking Google from inside a much larger company.

Libero is still there in 2026 with a search box on it. What sits behind that box has not been Italian for a very long time. What Italy actually lost in 2003 was not a better search engine, because Google was already better by then. It lost the last case of an Italian company owning the index of its own language, and no country in Europe has managed to get one of those back since.

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