Lokace

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

~ the obit ~

In 1994 I was ten years old and four years away from a modem, and the French web was already having its first argument about search. Lokace went up that year as the first search engine built in France. That is early enough to predate Yahoo becoming a company and to come a full year before AltaVista existed at all.

Seven people are credited with it: Orianne Garcia, Alexandre Roos, Christophe Schaming, Dan Serfaty, Thierry Lunati, Philippe Payan and Marc Reeb. The same company launched Caramail in 1997, which turned into the free webmail account a whole French generation remembers, and by that point the search engine was already the less interesting thing on the shelf.

What went wrong with Lokace is not complicated and there is no kinder way to write it down. It crawled, it indexed, and the results it gave back were not good. Abondance, which has been covering French search since the period in question, said so plainly in hindsight: the engine never proved relevant in what it returned, and that is what pulled it down so quickly. There were French competitors doing better and American ones doing much better, and search does not reward being early.

Groupe Infosources, which ran the Infonie service, bought it in October 1998. Infonie then went to Belgacom and from there into Tiscali, and each handover moved Lokace another step away from anyone with a reason to care. Tiscali already owned Nomade.fr, a hand-edited French directory with an actual audience. Owning two search products in one market is a situation that resolves itself.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why it never worked ~

French-language search in the 1990s had a genuine technical excuse and Lokace did not survive on it. Accents and a morphology that turns one verb into dozens of written forms both make a naive index worse in French than the same code would be in English. Whoever solved that was going to solve it by throwing more machines and more linguistics at the problem than a small French company had, and the people who did that were in California.

The other half of it is that France spent the back end of the 1990s betting on directories rather than on crawlers. Nomade and Voilà were lists that human editors wrote and maintained, and for a web of a few hundred thousand French pages a good human list beat a bad index every time. By the time the crawl was obviously the right answer, the crawl that mattered was not French.

~ what the founders did next ~

The engine is the least of what came out of that group. Caramail launched in 1997 and ran to around nine million accounts before Lycos Europe bought it in 2000. Dan Serfaty went on to found Viadeo, which spent most of the 2000s being the French answer to LinkedIn. Orianne Garcia's name attaches to Caramail rather than to Lokace in nearly every retelling, which is fair enough, because one of the two had users.

Lokace's own ending is a redirect and nothing more. Abondance noted at the end of December 2001 that lokace.com and lokace.fr had both been pointed at Nomade, and the engine itself was switched off the following year. There is no closure notice to quote from, because by then there was nothing running that would have needed one.

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