Cadê?

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

~ the last words ~

Cadê never reached turkey at meaningful scale. It was a brazilian search engine before google became the default everywhere, in a portuguese-language web most of the world did not visit. The first time i looked it up was while researching this site, decades after it had already become a yahoo redirect.

The name is just the portuguese word for "where is it." Two electrical engineering students at the university of são paulo, Fábio de Oliveira and Gustavo Viberti, launched it in september 1995. It was the first brazilian-built search engine that actually worked for brazilian users, and it grew with the brazilian internet through the late 90s. By november 2001 cadê was pulling 2.3 million unique users a month, which was a lot for a brazil-only product in that era.

StarMedia, the pan-latin-american content portal, bought 100 percent of cadê in 1999 when it was already the largest search site in brazil. That deal made sense at the time. StarMedia was trying to be the yahoo of latin america and a cataloged search engine was the missing piece.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Cadê worked the way pre-google search engines worked. Humans cataloged the brazilian web by hand. Editors put sites in categories. Users typed in a query and got a list that another person had organized. For a web measured in tens of thousands of brazilian pages, this was tolerable. For a web measured in millions, it was not.

The bigger problem was google's crawler. The pagerank approach scaled to any language with no editor team behind it. While brazilian editors at cadê were still manually approving submissions, google was already indexing the same pages by itself and ranking them better.

~ what really happened ~

On 8 january 2002 yahoo bought cadê from starmedia for an undisclosed amount. The yahoo brasil president at the time said the deal would position them "in the fight for market leadership" against the brazilian dot-com competition. The cadê brand kept running for a while as a yahoo search front-end. The cadê.com.br domain still exists as a redirect to yahoo's search page in 2026.

~ what replaced it ~

Cadê was the brazilian directory tradition. Human curation, language-specific cataloging, regional editorial taste. It died the same way altavista died and lycos died, with google quietly cataloging more of the web faster and never asking for editor approval. The brazilian search market eventually went the same direction as everyone else's: google by default, with a yahoo brasil-shaped ghost in the background.

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