livedoor Search

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

~ the goodbye ~

livedoor began in 1999 as a free dial-up provider, and the portal that came bundled with it carried a search form and a weather forecast from the first day, with the news alongside. The search form outlasted almost everything that was added after it. It was still there in 2020, on a front page that by then was mostly an aggregator, and it was still only there if you were on a computer.

That last detail is the one LINE named when it finally switched the thing off. Asked on 22 April 2020 why search was ending, the company said that livedoor had only ever run search on the PC, that it had looked at how people were actually using the site, and that it would rather put the resources into the news and blog services where the support was. The box went dark on 18 May 2020. The weather forecast, the other survivor from 1999, went the same year.

The numbers underneath that decision were not small. livedoor's own media kit put 60 million visitors on the portal in January 2020, four months before the shutdown. A search box can sit inside a property that size and still be the part nobody touches.

~ the chronicle ~

~ whose index it was ~

From September 2010 every kind of search the box offered ran on NAVER, the Korean search company, which had arrived in Japan through the subsidiary that became NHN Japan and then LINE. Image search went across first, which the trade press covered as the opening move of the group partnership. So for the last decade of its life, typing a query into livedoor returned NAVER's answers with livedoor's styling on them.

There is a wrinkle in that arrangement which the Japanese record does not resolve. NAVER closed its own Japanese search engine in December 2013 and said publicly that the company would concentrate on LINE and on its curation site instead. What was behind the livedoor box for the six and a half years after that is not documented anywhere I can find. The box kept answering. Whose index it was answering from, by the end, is a question the shutdown notice did not bother with.

~ the desktop problem ~

Japanese search in 2020 meant Google or Yahoo, with very little else in the running, and a portal's own search box had long since stopped being a product at all. It was a habit. What killed this one was narrower than market share. It was that livedoor never built the mobile version. Everything else on the portal made the jump to the phone, and search stayed on the desktop, which by 2020 meant it was being used by whoever still arrived at a Japanese portal through a browser on a computer.

This is a slower way to die than being beaten. Nobody chose Google over livedoor Search. Readers just stopped being in the room where it lived.

~ what LINE said ~

The headline on the Japanese story carried a question mark. Z Holdings, which owned Yahoo, and LINE were due to merge inside the year, and everybody covering Japanese tech was watching to see which of the two companies' overlapping products would survive the overlap. A search engine is about as overlapping as it gets. So the obvious reading was that livedoor Search died because Yahoo's search was going to be in the same house.

LINE never confirmed it, and the statement it did give explains the shutdown adequately on its own. It is worth leaving the two accounts side by side rather than picking one: the official reason is a desktop-only product with declining use, the reported suspicion is a merger, and the only thing documented is that both were true of the same week in April 2020.

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