IceRocket

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

~ the last words ~

Blog search never had much to search in my part of the internet. The Turkish web of the mid-2000s organized itself into forums: donanimhaber for hardware, frmtr for everything else, threads that ran for years with the same forty people in them and a signature block under every post. That material sat behind a forum's own search box, not in an index of weblogs, so a tool built to find the newest post across two hundred million blogs had almost no Turkish surface to touch. I was reading and posting the entire time IceRocket existed. Nearly none of it was in a shape IceRocket could see.

Blake Rhodes launched it in April 2004, and the problem it existed for was a real one. Google crawled the web on a schedule measured in days and ranked what it found by accumulated authority. Blogs updated in minutes and linked to each other constantly, so the freshest and most connected part of the web was also the part the largest search engine was slowest to notice. IceRocket sorted by time.

Mark Cuban backed it and wrote about it repeatedly on his own blog, which in 2005 was itself a distribution channel worth having. A sale to Think Partnership was announced and then fell apart. The company ran on independently for six more years and kept bolting on sources as the real-time web drifted off blogs and onto Twitter, along with a tool called Big Buzz for watching a single term climb across all of them at once.

~ the record ~

~ the buzz years ~

For about five years there was a small industry in this. Technorati had the authority ranking that everybody quoted in their sidebar and the reliability complaints that came with it. Bloglines and BlogPulse each took a piece of the same job from different directions. IceRocket's pitch was speed and a plain results page, and for a stretch it was what people opened when the better-known option was not answering. Its logo was a cartoon rocket with the promise printed along the side: every search is a direct hit.

All of these companies were selling the same premise, which was that the conversation happening online right now is a thing you can point a crawler at and get a straight answer back from. That premise held only as long as the conversation lived on the open web with a feed hanging off it. Every blog published its own RSS and linked out by habit. The index was possible because the material wanted to be indexed.

~ what meltwater wanted ~

Meltwater bought IceRocket in August 2011. Meltwater was a media monitoring company with twenty thousand corporate customers across fifty-seven offices, and what it was buying was the crawler and the people who ran it. The press release said IceRocket would keep operating as a standalone search engine while the technology went into a product called Meltwater Buzz. Both halves of that sentence stayed true for a while.

What follows is the ordinary version of this ending. A free public search box costs real money to run and returns nothing a sales team can point at in a meeting. The same index behind a login, sold as social media intelligence, is a line item on a renewal. The public site was the half with no revenue attached to it and it lasted five and a half years on momentum.

~ the eighth of march ~

The notice was one sentence long. Icerocket.com would be shut down permanently on 8 March 2017, please switch over to other search engines, thank you for all the years together. No successor was named, because by then there was not one to name.

What died was not really a company. It was the assumption underneath it. Finding out who is talking about something right now stopped being a search question and became an API question, and the answer stopped being free at exactly the moment the conversation moved inside two or three companies that sell it. IceRocket could crawl two hundred million blogs because two hundred million blogs were sitting in the open. Nothing that replaced them is.

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