Infoseek isweb Light

» see isweb.infoseek.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Infoseek died twice and the Japanese death was the bigger one. The American Infoseek, the mid-90s search engine Disney bought and folded into Go, already has a grave here; it stopped mattering in 2001. The Japanese arm was a separate thing that Rakuten bought and kept running, and nine years after the US version was buried it was still hosting a couple of million homepages.

isweb came to Infoseek Japan in August 2001, when it took over an existing free hosting service called freeweb. Rakuten incorporated Infoseek and by 2003 was running it directly. The service split in two: isweb Light was free, fifty megabytes, Perl CGI only, with a banner ad served into every page. isweb Basic was paid, three hundred megabytes, no ads, and it would run PHP or Python or Ruby and let you send mail.

Light is the one that mattered. It sat in the same slot as GeoCities Japan and the Japanese web of the 2000s was built on exactly this kind of thing: a free subdomain, a table layout, a hit counter at the bottom and a BBS bolted on the side. Fan pages and doujin circle pages, typing-practice trainers, personal diaries from before blogging had a name for itself. None of it was in a language I can read and none of it ever reached me, but I know the shape, because GeoCities had the same one.

~ the case file ~

~ 25 August ~

Rakuten posted the notice on 25 August 2010: the free service would end on 31 October. That is sixty-seven days to find a new host, work out what your files were, and move them, for an audience that in many cases had not touched their site in five years and had long since lost whatever email address the account was registered to.

The Japanese web reacted the way you would expect. Impress Internet Watch ran it in the Yajiuma column. Bloggers wrote the my-site-is-ten-years-old-and-now-it-is-ending post. At least one person put up a page titled an emergency, asking for help saving a typing trainer that had been hosted there for years. A lot of it did not get saved.

~ two in the morning ~

The deadline was 31 October but the actual deletion ran in the small hours of 1 November, around 2am Japan time. Users reported watching their own sites go from live to gone while they were still awake. The content logs went with the pages.

~ the half that kept running ~

isweb Basic, the paid tier, was not part of the 2010 closure and carried on for another year and a half. It ended on 21 May 2012 alongside Rakuten's COOL ONLINE membership service, by which point there was very little left to end.

Infoseek itself is still there. infoseek.co.jp answers today as a Rakuten news portal, same name, no search engine of its own and no hosting. The brand outlived both of the products that made it worth having.

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