Groovle

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

~ the eulogy ~

On 24 December 2009 a three member panel at the National Arbitration Forum handed down its decision in Google Inc. v. 207 Media, claim number FA0911001293500. Google had asked to be given the domain groovle.com on the grounds that it was nearly identical to google.com, differing by two letters, and that the site it pointed at deliberately imitated Google's search page. The panel said no. The domain would remain with the respondent.

What 207 Media actually ran was modest. Groovle gave you a Google search box with a picture behind it, your own or one from a wallpaper library the site kept, and set that page as your homepage. The search underneath was Google's. The advertising on the results was Google's pay per click inventory, with 207 Media taking a share of the revenue. The site's own slogans said so plainly: "Your Groovy Google Custom Search Homepage".

The panel's reasoning turned on sound rather than spelling. Adding an R and trading a G for a V, they found, gave an entirely different sense to the word, the sense of groove or groovy. Zak Muscovitch, the lawyer who argued it, put the result more simply afterward: most people appreciate it when the little guy takes on the giant and wins. Google had lost a domain dispute exactly once before this, over froogles.com.

~ the dossier ~

~ the case ~

The paperwork moves faster than you would expect. Google submitted its complaint electronically on 6 November 2009 and the hard copy arrived on 9 November. The panel was appointed on 10 December. The decision came out on 24 December, and the press caught up with it at the end of the month, The Register running it on 30 December under a headline about Google being slapped in a domain name spat.

The decision also recorded that groovle.com had first been created on 13 May 2003 and was registered by 207 Media on 6 June 2007, which is as close to a birthday as this one has.

~ the business underneath ~

The strange part of the case is the commercial arrangement. Groovle's search results were Google's, served through Google's custom search product. Groovle's revenue was a cut of Google's advertising. Google was simultaneously the complainant and the supplier, trying to take back a domain from a partner that existed entirely inside its own ecosystem and sent it traffic.

The wallpapers were real infrastructure too. The crawls of groovle.com from 2007 are full of a /wallpaperbase/wallpapers/ tree sorted into categories, the sort of image library that a free homepage service in 2007 had to maintain itself because nobody had built a photo API for it yet.

~ the quiet part ~

On 15 February 2014 groovle.com served its normal three kilobyte homepage, the same one it had been serving since 2007. On 17 May the address answered with a redirect, and every capture after that is a redirect or an error, through years of them, until the brand reappears in 2021 attached to a page that has nothing to do with search. No statement and no farewell post. The one time anyone wrote about Groovle was when Google tried to take it, and nobody wrote anything when it actually ended.

I never used it, and the reason is the era more than the country. My habit of setting a homepage belongs to the internet cafes I was in between 2002 and 2005, where the homepage was whatever the owner had pointed the machines at and nobody touched it. By 2007, when Groovle opened, I had a connection of my own at home and typed searches straight into the address bar like everyone else.

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