GeoURL

» see geourl.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

GeoURL described itself as a location-to-URL reverse directory, which is a dry way of saying it answered one question: what else is near here. You added a meta tag to the head of your page carrying your latitude and longitude, you pinged GeoURL to tell it you existed, and from then on anyone standing on that spot on the map could find you.

The tag had a name borrowed from Usenet. An ICBM address was old hacker slang for putting your coordinates in your signature file, half a joke about making yourself targetable, and GeoURL took the convention seriously enough to build an index on top of it.

Joshua Schachter built the prototype in 2002, the year before he started Delicious, and ran it until 2004. The site then went quiet for roughly a year. Ask Bjørn Hansen rebuilt the whole thing and launched GeoURL 2.0 in February 2005, and the about page said so plainly for the rest of the site's life, crediting the original and dating the handover.

~ the case file ~

~ the meta tag ~

Think about what was missing in 2002. No GPS in anybody's pocket and no map API worth building on, so if you wanted a geographic index of the web there was no way to derive it. You had to ask authors to declare where they were and trust them. The entire system ran on voluntary self-declaration by people who thought putting their coordinates on the internet was a fun idea, and for a few years that was enough to make it work.

The premise also only pays off at density. GeoURL's pitch was that you could find your neighbor's weblog, which assumes your neighbors have weblogs with coordinates in them. In Ankara in 2003 that was not the shape of the local web, and the useful version of GeoURL lived in the places where blogging was already thick on the ground. I could have added the tag. Nothing near me was in there.

~ how a directory rots ~

The last healthy capture of the front page is from 3 December 2013, and the counter on it reads 9,601,000 sites. Below the counter sits the list of recently added entries, and it is almost entirely hotel rooms in Beijing and rental apartments in Berlin. A run of Vietnamese blogspot pages had got in among them. An index that takes anyone's word for where they are is a gift to whoever sells local search placement, and by the end that was most of the inbound traffic.

Then it just stopped. The Internet Archive has the page answering normally on 3 December 2013 and answering 503 by 9 January 2014, and it never recovered. There was no farewell post and no redirect, only a server error that kept repeating for years afterward while the domain sat there. Schachter's other project from that era got bought twice and written about endlessly. This one went out as an HTTP status code.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »