Graphiq

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

~ the goodbye ~

For about two years, American news articles were full of charts that nobody had drawn. You would be reading about a senator or a dog breed, and there would be a live interactive panel sitting in the middle of the page with the relevant numbers already in it, credited to a company in Santa Barbara you had never heard of. That company was Graphiq, and giving those charts away was the whole business.

It started in 2009 under a plainer name. Kevin J. O'Connor, who had co-founded DoubleClick a decade earlier, put up $750,000 of his own alongside Scott Leonard and Brayton Johnson and built FindTheBest, a site that would compare anything in a category against everything else in it. Nine categories at the 2010 public launch. Kleiner Perkins came in for $2 million that December, and the total raised reached $32 million by 2013. In May 2014 the site was taking 23 million visits a month with about 110 people behind it.

The comparison tables were the visible part. The valuable part sat underneath them, a structured database that by August 2015 held a billion entities with a hundred and twenty billion attributes hanging off them. On 11 August 2015 the company renamed itself Graphiq and pointed all of that at newsrooms instead of shoppers, offering ten billion pre-built live-updating visualizations that editors at Reuters and the Associated Press could drop straight into a story.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the troll it beat ~

In May 2013, while it was still FindTheBest, a company called Lumen View Technology sued it over a patent on computer-assisted bilateral decision making. FindTheBest did not settle. It got the patent declared invalid, after which Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York ordered Lumen View to cover the legal fees and then doubled the award specifically to deter the next one of these. The Federal Circuit affirmed in January 2016.

That case is why a mid-sized Santa Barbara comparison site has a permanent footnote in American patent law. It arrived just as the Supreme Court's Octane Fitness decision made fee shifting possible, and it turned into an early proof that a defendant could make a nuisance suit cost the plaintiff more than it cost the target. The Electronic Frontier Foundation covered both rulings.

~ where the charts went ~

Amazon bought Graphiq in May 2017 for a reported fifty million dollars, with more than a hundred employees, and did not announce it. The deal only became public on 21 July 2017, when the Los Angeles Times reported it. What Amazon had bought was the entity database, which is exactly the shape of thing a voice assistant needs when somebody asks Alexa how tall a building is. The publisher product was overhead. On the same day the story broke, the features for news publishers went away.

The archive shows the site thinning out ahead of the news. Captures of graphiq.com run around seven and a half kilobytes through May 2017, drop to under six thousand bytes from 1 June, and hold there, shrinking, until the last capture on 3 October 2018. After that the domain goes quiet for years and then stops resolving entirely. findthebest.com does not resolve either. Wikipedia still files the company as active under Amazon, which is true of the engineers and false of everything a reader could visit.

Graphiq was built against a problem that lives inside an American newsroom, and you have to be sitting in one to feel it. The closest I ever came to the company was reading an article that happened to have one of its panels dropped into the middle of it, which is also the closest most of its audience ever came. What survives of the company is billions of facts, read out loud in American kitchens by a plastic cylinder, under somebody else's brand.

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