Bixee

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

~ the goodbye ~

Bixee launched in October 2005 as a vertical search engine over India's job listings. It hosted no jobs of its own. It crawled the boards that did and put one search box across all of them, so a single query reached Naukri and the newspaper classified pages at the same time.

The founders were Rajesh Warrier and Ruban Phukan, both out of Yahoo. They ran a picture search called Pixrat alongside it. In December 2006 MIH India, the Naspers arm that became ibibo, bought both companies and took the founders along with them.

India's job-hunting internet in 2006 is about as far from a Turkish engineering student's screen as a product can be and still share the decade. I have no memory of Bixee and no reason to have one. What survives of it is a court order.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the injunction ~

Naukri.com was India's dominant job board and its money sat in the database behind it. Bixee's crawler indexed that database and sent users straight through to individual listings, past the Naukri homepage and past the advertising on it. Naukri sued.

The Delhi High Court restrained Bixee from deep linking to Naukri's content and from reproducing it, with the order landing at the start of 2006. Whatever anyone makes of the reasoning, it is the case Indian lawyers still cite, and it went the other way from most of the American and European rulings of the same years, which had generally treated a link as just a link.

~ what the domain became ~

Naspers kept bixee.com up for five and a half years after buying it. The homepage through 2011 and into 2012 still said Jobs in India in the title bar and still carried a job seeker login, which is what a site looks like when somebody is paying the hosting bill and nobody is doing anything else.

The Wayback Machine has the job engine answering on 11 June 2012 and Goibibo's flight booking page answering on the same address nine days later. Goibibo was the travel business the same owner had built out of ibibo, so this was an internal transfer of a domain that still had some residual traffic worth catching. India's first job search engine spent its last stretch pointing people at airfares.

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