Feedster

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

~ the obituary ~

The last thing Feedster ever did was relaunch. On 27 June 2007 it put out a redesign along with a rebuilt search index it said would cut the spam, plus a widget that let any site drop feed results into its own pages. The day after, TechCrunch filed it under the walking dead. Five months later the search box was returning nothing at all and the company blog had been taken down.

It started as two things. Scott Johnson built the first version in March 2003 and merged it that June with RSS-Search, which Francois Schiettecatte had been running separately. Before the merge Johnson's side had carried the working name Roogle, and the logo files with that name in them stayed on the server for years after the rename.

For roughly two years it was one of the two answers to a real question. RSS had made every blog machine-readable at the same moment blogs stopped being countable, and somebody had to index the result. Feedster crawled feeds rather than pages, which meant it could return something written eleven minutes ago, and in 2003 no general search engine could do that. It ran a Top 500 blogs list from August 2005 that people argued about the way people argue about charts.

The money kept arriving and the leadership kept leaving. A Series A closed on 2 June 2005 led by Selby Venture Partners with Omidyar Network and a long list of angels behind it. Scott Rafer stepped down as chief executive that September. Johnson left afterward. More funding and a new president came in July 2006, by which point the search results had been openly broken for months. Total raised across six rounds was $6.45 million.

What a blog search engine returns is whatever got crawled, and the crawl was English. Turkish writing on the web in that window was thin and scattered across free hosts, and mostly invisible to a feed spider tuned for the American blog roll. So the tool worked and it answered about a different internet than the one outside my window. Technorati had the same shape and the same blind spot. The gap only closed later, and it closed because general search engines started indexing everything rather than because feed search got better.

~ the case file ~

~ it was called roogle first ~

The working name tells you the ambition and the problem in one word. Feed search was pitched as a second search engine for the part of the web that updated, sitting next to the one that indexed the part that did not. That framing made sense for about thirty months.

Google Blog Search arrived in September 2005 and did the same job attached to an index that already had everybody. The independent case collapsed quickly after that. Technorati lasted longer by turning into an advertising network and BlogPulse lasted by being owned by Nielsen and pointed at market research. Feedster had neither an owner with a use for it nor a second business, and a search engine with no second business is a hosting bill.

~ six and a half million dollars of runway ~

The autopsy TechCrunch wrote in June 2007 is the useful document, and its argument was not that Feedster had run out of money. The argument was that it had money left and nothing to do with it: no pressure forcing a decision, not enough left of the team to attempt anything, so the company kept existing at a low temperature while the market moved. The recommendation in print was to hand the remaining capital back to the shareholders and let everybody go.

That is how it went, minus the announcement. ReadWrite checked on 21 November 2007 and found the site with no sign of life on it. The archive's last capture of a working Feedster is from 16 October. The domain traded through several hands afterward and today serves an unrelated product with the same name, which is the ordinary fate of a four-letter dot-com that somebody once bought fairly.

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