Junglee

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

~ the obit ~

There are two Junglees and i was in the wrong place for both. The first was a database company in Sunnyvale that most people never saw directly, and the second was a shopping site aimed at india that i had no reason to open from ankara. What makes it worth a grave is that they are the same name, owned by the same company, killed by the same owner nineteen years apart.

The original was founded in 1996 by graduate students out of Stanford, among them Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, with Rakesh Mathur and Ashish Gupta. What they built was called a virtual database, and the idea was better than the products it ended up inside: treat a few hundred unrelated websites as if they were one table you could query. Point it at job listings and you get a job search. Point it at shops and you get a price comparison across all of them.

Amazon announced it was buying Junglee on 4 august 1998, on the same day it announced it was buying PlanetAll. Junglee cost about 1.6 million Amazon shares, which contemporary reports valued anywhere between 180 and 250 million dollars depending on the day and the writer. In 1998 that was a serious amount of money for a company whose product was a query engine.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first death ~

Amazon used the technology immediately, in a feature called Shop the Web that let you search products across retailers who were not Amazon. It was the correct use of what they had bought, and it lasted barely a year. By 1999 the feature was gone and the Junglee staff had been moved onto other work.

The reason is not a mystery and Amazon has never particularly hidden it. A comparison engine's job is to tell you where something is cheaper, and a shop that owns a comparison engine has to keep answering that question against itself. Amazon spent the following two decades building the opposite thing, a store you search inside rather than across. The 1998 purchase turned out to be a talent deal with a product attached, and the product was the part they threw away.

~ the second death ~

Junglee.com came back in february 2012, in india, as a comparison shopping site. This was not nostalgia. At the time indian rules did not permit a foreign-owned company to run a retail inventory business online, so Amazon opened the only kind of shop it was allowed to open: one that sent you to other shops. It was Amazon's first flag in the country, planted more than a year before Amazon.in opened as a marketplace in june 2013.

Once the real marketplace existed, Junglee spent four years looking for a second job. In 2014 it started taking free classified listings, and in 2016 it added peer to peer selling to go after OLX and Quikr. None of it stuck. In november 2017 Amazon shut it down and moved what was left into a classifieds feature on Amazon.in called Local Finds. Reports of the closure are dated 13 november.

~ what got buried with it ~

The people did much better than the product. Rajaraman and Harinarayan went on to found Kosmix, which Walmart bought and turned into its labs arm, and Rajaraman is better known now for the data mining textbook than for any of it. Ram Shriram, who ran Junglee and joined Amazon with the sale, went from there onto the first board of Google. The chain from a 1996 database startup to Amazon's early stake in its future rival runs directly through this company.

What did not survive is the idea itself: a search across every shop at once, run by nobody who sells anything. It has been rebuilt and killed off perhaps a dozen times since 1996 and it fails the same way every time. Whoever ends up owning it eventually has something of their own to sell you.

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