IndexMaster

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

~ the goodbye ~

A law library in 2001 had a purchasing problem that sounds quaint now. Legal treatises ran to hundreds of dollars each and went stale fast, and there was no way to learn what was actually inside one without buying it or driving to a library that had already made the mistake. Publisher catalogs described books in marketing language. The index was the honest part of the book and it was locked inside the book.

IndexMaster sold the index. From 1998 the company put the tables of contents and the back-of-book indexes of legal treatises and monographs behind a subscription, so that a librarian could search across thousands of titles and see the real structure of a book before spending anything on it. The wordmark carried a line underneath reading The Legal Research Tool. In 2000 the American Association of Law Libraries named it Best New Product of the Year.

This is a narrow product built for a specific job, and that job belonged to people who ordered books for a living. I have never ordered a book for a law library. The grave is assembled out of an award citation and a crawler's record rather than out of anything I was present for, and the only element of it I recognize on sight is the software the company happened to be running.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually sold ~

An index is a map of what an author bothered to cover and at what depth. Two treatises with nearly identical titles can have completely different indexes, and the difference is invisible from the cover. Librarians used IndexMaster to decide what to order. Lawyers used it to work out which book already on the shelf would contain the section they needed.

By the mid-2000s the site ran on e107, a free open-source PHP content system that hobbyists used for clan pages and small community forums. A paid legal database sitting on the same stack as somebody's guild site is not a knock on either one. It tells you the operation was small, and that what customers paid for was the data rather than the software wrapped around it.

~ the cliff ~

The archive dates the end closely. On 11 October 2015 indexmaster.com was still serving the full e107 front page it had served for years. Six weeks later, on 22 November, the same address returned two lines of HTML pointing at /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi, which is what cPanel shows when a hosting account exists and nothing has been published into it.

Nothing announced this. There is no closure notice anywhere in the record and no farewell page. A subscription service that had supplied American law libraries for seventeen years stopped being a website between two crawls, and the only reason the week is known at all is that a robot happened to visit twice.

~ what killed it ~

Full-text search removed the premise. IndexMaster existed because the inside of a book was invisible from outside it, and across the 2000s that stopped being true. Google Books put scanned pages in front of anyone with a browser, while HeinOnline and the treatise libraries inside Westlaw and Lexis folded whole texts into subscriptions that firms were already paying for. Once you can search the book, paying separately to search its index gets harder to justify every year.

The domain is still registered. It answers with about a hundred bytes of JavaScript that bounce you to a for-sale lander. The wordmark with The Legal Research Tool set under it survives only because a crawler saved the image file in 2007, and that saved file is the reason this page has a logo on it at all.

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