Atlas.cz

» see atlas.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Most portals were founded. Atlas.cz was demonstrated. In 1997 a group at a Prague software company called Sprinx, working out of a building on the nuclear physics faculty of the Czech Technical University, needed to show what Microsoft's Active Server Pages could actually do. What they built to show it was a full-text search engine for the Czech web, one of the first. It went into private testing in February and opened to the public on 1 April 1997.

Pavel Sodomka had come out of Microsoft's Czech operation and Michal Bláha was the other name attached to the beginning. The demo did not stay a demo. Seznam had appeared at almost exactly the same moment, Centrum arrived shortly after, and for the next decade the Czech internet ran on those three front doors.

Atlas did what a national portal did. Mail, a directory, chat, weather, and the one property that carried it further than any of the others: Jízdní řády, the national train and bus timetable. People who had no opinion about portals looked up a bus on Atlas. When the traffic figures peaked in September 2006 and Atlas sat second in the country at over 2.2 million monthly uniques, a large part of that number was the timetable.

None of this reached me. Czech is not a language I read, and the Czech web of 1997 to 2008 was a closed loop where a domestic search engine could beat Google on its own ground for years. That happened in a handful of countries and Turkey was not one of them. By 2004 I was searching in Google like everybody else here, and Mynet was a homepage rather than an engine.

~ the dossier ~

~ the restart ~

In 2000 a fund called II. EPIC Holding put money in and Atlas went abroad, into Slovakia successfully and into Ukraine not at all. It signed a deal with ICQ. In 2004 it went back to Microsoft and ran the Czech MSN portal. All of that is a company trying to grow sideways because the position it wanted at home was taken.

By 2006 the ambition had shrunk to something honest. David Duroň came in as chief executive and announced a project called Restart, and the stated goal was not to beat Seznam, which everybody had accepted was out of reach, but to take second place off Centrum by 2008. That is a rare thing to see written down. A company publicly setting its target at silver.

~ the numbers underneath ~

The 2007 accounts explain the ending better than the traffic charts do. Revenue of 187 million crowns, a loss of 344,000 crowns on the year, and accumulated losses past 100 million. Atlas was roughly breaking even on an operation that had never once earned back what had been put into it.

Warburg Pincus, the American fund behind Centrum Holdings, was on the other side of the second-place fight with deeper pockets and no particular need to win it on merit. On 26 February 2008 the integration of Atlas.cz and Centrum.cz was announced. On 26 May 2008 Centrum Holdings became the operator of Atlas.cz, and the target Duroň had set for that same year was met by being purchased.

~ what is at the address now ~

Type atlas.cz into a browser in 2026 and something answers. It redirects to atlas.centrum.cz, the page title still says Atlas.cz, and the content below it is Centrum's news feed. The mail still works for people who never left.

This is the Excite ending rather than the GeoCities ending. Nothing was switched off and no announcement was made, because there was nothing to announce: the search engine, the editorial staff and the company all stopped being separate things on one day in May 2008, and the name was kept because a domain with eleven years of typed-in traffic behind it is worth more alive than deleted. What survives is a wordmark on a competitor's stack.

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