Findory

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

~ the obituary ~

Findory opened in January 2004 as an ordinary front page of news. Then you clicked something, and it stopped being ordinary. The ranking shifted toward what you had just read and toward what other readers with similar taste had read, and by the third or fourth article the page in front of you was not the page anybody else was seeing. You never made an account and there was no configuration step to skip.

The man behind it had the right background for the trick. Greg Linden had worked on Amazon's recommendation system, the item-to-item collaborative filtering that put "customers who bought this also bought" on product pages everywhere, and Findory applied a hybrid of the same idea to news, blogs, videos and podcasts. At its height it was serving over 100,000 unique readers a month and about five million page views, and it had been written up by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Time and Der Spiegel. There was a personalized search that reordered Google's results, and personalized advertising to go with the personalized articles.

Findory's whole argument was that it learned you from your clicks, and what it had to learn you from was an English-language wire of American papers and American bloggers. Personalize that for somebody sitting in Turkey in 2005 and you get an excellent front page about a country they do not live in. My news came off Turkish portals and my technology came off Turkish forums, so the premise had nothing to work with on my side of the map, however well the mathematics worked on its own.

~ the case file ~

~ a single click ~

The thing worth preserving about Findory is how little it asked for. Every personalization product since has wanted an account, a sign-in, a set of topics ticked on an onboarding screen, a social graph to borrow. Findory wanted one click and started adjusting immediately, on the theory that the first thing you touched said more about you than any form could.

Linden described the method as a hybrid: part content similarity, part the behavior of other readers whose clicks looked like yours. The second half meant Findory worked best as a crowd, and the crowd it had was small. One hundred thousand readers a month is a real audience and still a thin signal, When the signal is thin a recommender leans on the content side of the hybrid, and the content side is the half anybody can build.

It also ran a blog-specific version called Blogory and a favorites feature. Podcasts and video went through the same engine. All of it was free, which was the problem nobody had an answer for. The advertising was personalized too, and personalized advertising at that scale in 2006 earned roughly what unpersonalized advertising at that scale earned.

~ the november that moved ~

The announcement went up on Sunday 30 September 2007 and was short: "Findory will be shutting down on November 1, 2007. The website will no longer carry news, blogs, videos, podcasts, or favorites." Then the post picked up updates. The date slipped, and the final rescheduled day was 22 November.

It ran a day past even the revised date. On 23 November 2007 findory.com was still serving a full 8,915-byte front page. Two days later the same address was 388 bytes, and the entire body read: "As of November 2007, Findory.com has shut down. Read more." That stub kept answering into the middle of December, and by early January 2008 the address had become a redirect.

~ the last webserver ~

Linden wrote the ending himself, on 18 December 2007, in a post of eight words: "Findory turned off its last webserver today. Sadness." He went on to publish a fifteen-part series about building it, which is more honest post-mortem than almost any founder leaves behind. Fetch findory.com today and it redirects into that archive, so the address now points at its own obituary.

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