Bluu

» see bluu.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Bluu started in 2006 as a tool József Szűcs built to make his own work easier, which is how a surprising number of search engines start and how almost none of them finish. By 2009 it had its own crawler and its own index, covering Hungarian-language sites and not much else. It opened to the public that December behind a registration wall, and dropped the wall in May 2010.

Searching only one language is a defensible strategy when you are one person. The index stayed small enough to be worth having opinions about, and Bluu had a lot of opinions. Type a town name and it would hand back the local weather. Type something that looked like a route and it offered the bus and train timetables. There was a currency converter and a calculator wired into the query box, a business directory, a price comparison, autosuggest, and a feature the documentation called the live topic, which changed what the front page showed you depending on the hour and the weather outside.

Some of it was fashionable for 2010 in a way that reads oddly now, including a real-time Twitter feed through a partnership with Yamm, and summaries lifted and translated out of Wikipedia. The whole system ran on an index one person maintained.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what one person built ~

The Hungarian press noticed. Index.hu and Origo both wrote it up between 2008 and 2009, back when a credible domestic challenger to Google was a story worth running anywhere in Central Europe, and the hardware forum logout.hu picked it apart in the way hardware forums do.

The front page in its final working summer ran about nine kilobytes. The Internet Archive has it at that weight through 8 August 2011, and then Bluu stopped.

~ the comeback it actually shipped ~

What happened next is why this one gets written up at all. The developers posted on Facebook that the shutdown was temporary and gave a date for the return: 25 January 2012, under the name Bluu 2.0 INSTANT. Most products that say this are saying goodbye and hoping nobody notices the difference.

Bluu was not doing that. On 1 December 2011 the domain was serving somebody's partner-program login page, which looks like the end. On 14 February 2012 it is serving a page titled Bluu Instant, described in its own meta tag as the Bluu Instant search system. By 16 March there is a second iteration, plainer, with a search box posting to a Hungarian-language results path and an OpenSearch descriptor registering itself to the browser as Bluu2. The relaunch was real and it was roughly on time.

~ test ~

It did not hold. By 4 May 2012 bluu.hu was answering with a redirect. The next archived capture of the front page, on 24 October 2012, is 412 bytes, and the entire body of the document is the word test. It stayed at roughly that size through 2013.

The domain is in other hands now and forwards to an unrelated investment platform, which is the ordinary fate of a short Hungarian word. Hungarian Wikipedia still records the shutdown as August 2011 and notes that no permanent reason was ever given. That entry is missing the better half of the story, which is that the comeback was delivered, on a date the developers had promised in public, to an audience that had spent six months going elsewhere.

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