Google Sidewiki

» see google.com/sidewiki as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i may have installed google toolbar around this period for the chrome migration, but i do not remember opening sidewiki on a single page. by 2009 my browser was already mostly firefox plus the chrome beta, and google toolbar was a leftover from the internet explorer era that i had not really uninstalled. that is the kind of feature sidewiki was. shipping inside a product that was already slowly being abandoned.

google launched sidewiki on 23 september 2009 as part of google toolbar version 6.0. once you turned it on, a sidebar would slide out next to any web page and let you read comments other users had posted on that exact url. you could add your own. the comments were ranked by a relevance algorithm based on upvotes and reviewer history. the idea was that wikipedia had layered information on top of a curated corpus, while sidewiki would layer information on top of the entire web.

publishers reacted badly. the comments were not attached to the host site's database or moderation system. they appeared on top of every news article, every product page, every personal blog, with no way for the page owner to remove them. webmaster forums filled with posts about how to block sidewiki overlays. some sites embedded scripts that detected the sidewiki frame and warned users that the comments did not represent the publisher.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it tried to do ~

the engineering ambition behind sidewiki was to turn the web into a layered medium. every page you visited would carry an annotation layer that other readers had contributed, available only if you had the right client. it was the same impulse that produced third voice in 1999 and crocodoc a few years later. sidewiki had the advantage of being inside the google toolbar that millions of users already had installed, which was supposed to fix the cold-start problem these earlier projects ran into.

the cold-start problem did not get fixed. without enough sidewiki users on the same page, the sidebar was usually empty or carried two spam comments and a self-promotional link from someone trying to seed traffic. the algorithm could rank the better contributors above the worse ones, but it could not invent comment volume the project never had.

~ how google killed it ~

on 2 september 2011 alan eustace posted on the official google blog under a heading he called "a fall spring-clean", listing services that were being closed down to focus on social. sidewiki was on the list along with several other small projects. the shutdown date was set for 5 december 2011. the toolbar was patched to remove the feature, and any sidewiki content stored on google's side stopped appearing in the sidebar. there was a brief window for users to export their own comments.

this happened in the same year as the google wave shutdown and the knol close announcement, all collateral cleanup before the google plus push. sidewiki was the smallest of the cuts and the one that drew the least public mourning. it was the feature most google toolbar users had never noticed they had.

~ what it left ~

the annotation-the-web idea did not die with sidewiki. hypothesis launched in 2011 and is still running in 2026 as a non-profit web-annotation tool used in academic publishing. genius added page annotation in 2016 and pulled it back in 2017. the broader pattern is that overlay annotation works inside narrow communities with shared incentives, and stops working when you try to make it general-purpose for the open web. sidewiki was the largest attempt at the general-purpose version. it lasted two years and three months.

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