Delver

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

~ the goodbye ~

Delver never had a public large enough to miss it. It was built in Israel for an English-speaking American web, and the clearest available measure of how many people used it is that its investors declined to put in another six million dollars.

The company started in 2007 under Liad Agmon, who had already built an information security firm called Onigma and sold it to McAfee. The product was social search. You connected your accounts, and Delver reordered ordinary web results so that pages written or touched by people you knew came up first.

The premise was that the web already held the answer and the actual problem was trust. A review from a stranger and a review from somebody you went to school with are not worth the same, and in 2008 no general search engine drew any distinction between the two. Delver drew it, which meant that before it could show you anything useful it had to ask you to hand over your contacts.

That request was the expensive part. It was early by roughly two years and short by roughly six million dollars, and by the start of 2009 the company was close to switching itself off.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the search that read your friends ~

The idea went on without the company. In October 2010 Microsoft wired Facebook into Bing so that results carried the faces of friends who had liked a page, and through 2012 Google pushed its own social layer into search under the name Search plus Your World. Both of them arrived holding a social graph they already owned. That was the one thing Delver had to ask for at the door.

~ bought by a department store ~

Globes carried the news at 10:43 on the morning of 8 March 2009. The buyer was Sears Holdings, the American chain that sold refrigerators and lawn mowers, and it was not shopping for a search engine to put on its website. It was shopping for engineers who were about to become available.

The team was reconstituted as SHC Israel, a development center flying the Sears flag. Agmon moved to the United States as a vice president of new services and later sat on the boards of the company's Home Electronics and Outlets units. Dynamic Yield, the personalization company he started in 2011 and sold to McDonald's for 300 million dollars in 2019, was the venture that actually paid off.

~ the promise in the placeholder ~

The search engine kept answering for a few days after the announcement. A working Delver appears in the archive for the last time on 12 March 2009. Then the crawler loses interest for nearly ten months, and when it returns on 7 January 2010 the homepage has been replaced by a notice of about 1,500 bytes.

It read: "Delver was acquired by Sears Holdings. We'll be back soon with exciting new stuff!" Under that was an address to write to if you wanted into the beta. The same page was still up in March 2010. In the error directory there was a graphic apologizing for the site being down, and the archive holds copies of it from December 2010 and May 2011, a remarkable stretch of time to keep apologizing for the absence of something with no plans to return. No beta ever opened.

The domain had a life before this one. In 2006 delver.com belonged to a Macintosh game developer and served artwork for a role-playing game called Cythera, which is still sitting in the archive a few folders away from the Sears notice. It has had owners since, too. Today the address answers in 114 bytes, which is the size of a registrar's placeholder.

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