Fooooo

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

~ the goodbye ~

There was a window of about three years when nobody knew which video site was going to win, and the sensible engineering answer was to search all of them at once. Fooooo was the Japanese entry in that category. Bank of Innovation put it into beta on 7 March 2007 with roughly 23 million videos already crawled, and by 16 May it was running in ten languages beyond Japanese with 28 million.

The name reads as a sigh, fuu, and the company gave it a second explanation on top: F for find, and five o's for the five continents, arranged like the Olympic rings. The wordmark had each o boxed and tilted in green, which is the kind of logo you only get from a small team that likes its own joke.

The growth curve is the interesting part. 42 million videos and a suggest box by 6 August 2007. A Facebook application on 21 August, which for a Japanese company in 2007 is early. A full rebuild on 30 October that added Niconico Douga to the crawl and pushed the index to 68 million. On 17 January 2008 @nifty wired its own homepage video search through Fooooo's engine, and the index hit 85 million. By 19 May 2008 it was about 130 million clips, with animated thumbnails, hot words, a blog parts widget and an RSS feed hanging off the side of it.

This was engineer bait of exactly the sort I went looking for at the time. In 2007 I was on TTNet broadband in Turkey and the video landscape from here was YouTube plus whatever people linked from forums, with a constant undertow of clips that had been mirrored to Dailymotion or Veoh because the original had gone. A search box across all of them at once was exactly the right tool. It was also in Japanese first, ranked for a Japanese audience, and I never saw it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the index ~

The site kept a public list of what it crawled and struck through the ones that had died, which by the end read as a casualty list for the whole era. Jumpcut, Revver, vsocial, Grouper, imeem, StreetFire, Motionbox, LiveVideo, Stickam Japan and a couple of dozen more, all of them crossed out on a page nobody was maintaining. Fooooo outlived nearly everything it indexed.

That was the flaw as well as the achievement. A meta-search is only worth using while the underlying market is fragmented. Every time one of those fifty sites closed, the case for searching across them got weaker, and by about 2011 the honest answer to where is that video was YouTube, with Niconico as the Japanese exception. At that point the crawler was still visiting fifty hosts to find things that lived on two of them.

~ two owners and a redirect ~

Bank of Innovation announced on 28 February 2013 that it was handing the video search business over, and the transfer completed on 31 March. The company had started making smartphone games the previous September and that turned out to be the correct call. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Mothers market in July 2018 and moved to the Growth market in April 2022, as a game studio with no search engine in it.

Dayz Inc took Fooooo and rebuilt it as a portal on 17 October 2013, bolting weather icons and a Togetter panel onto what had been a video index. Dayz also made a browser called Kinza, and set Fooooo as its default search engine, which meant the site's remaining job was to be the thing a browser opened with.

Then it stopped. The last working capture of the front page in the Internet Archive is 6 November 2020. The next one, on 6 December, is a redirect to kinza.start.me, which is where it has pointed ever since. No announcement, no farewell page, no date. A video search engine that had once indexed 130 million clips across the whole world was turned into a forwarding address, and whoever did it did not write anything down.

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