MARSFLAG

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

~ the obit ~

The oldest copy of marsflag.com in the Internet Archive was taken on 9 March 2005, which is also the day the beta opened. That is a tidy coincidence and a rare one. Most dead search engines have to be dated by inference; this one was crawled on its first day.

The idea took one sentence to explain and a great deal of hardware to honor. A normal results page gives you a title and a scrap of text under it, and from those you guess whether the page is worth the click. MARSFLAG rendered the page instead. Each result carried a thumbnail image of what you would actually get, laid out in a grid, so the decision happened before the load rather than after it. It arrived under a description that stuck to it, the search engine you could see.

Behind it was Shinya Takei, born in Matsumoto in 1971 and raised in Chiba, who left an electrical engineering course at Chiba Institute of Technology before finishing it. He founded the company in October 1998 under the name be void, after a spell at a production outfit building early commercial websites. Money came in on the strength of the idea rather than the traffic: Proto Corporation put in 500 million yen in 2004, and SBI and JAFCO led a 600 million yen round in 2005.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ seeing before clicking ~

The full portal launched on 8 May 2006, fourteen months after the beta, and the company spent on making people look at it. Kaori Manabe, who was then one of the most visible bloggers in Japan and a fixture on television, was hired for the launch events.

It never took the market. Nothing did: Japanese search by the middle of the 2000s was Yahoo! Japan and Google, and a third place existed mostly as an argument you made to investors. What MARSFLAG had was a feature rather than a position, and the feature was costly in exactly the way a challenger cannot afford, because rendering a thumbnail of every page in an index means visiting and drawing every page in the index.

~ the bookmark that fed the index ~

There was a second product called FACE, also sold as MARK AGENT, an online bookmark manager paired with a browser toolbar. The company described it as the first cloud service in Japan. What made it interesting was the back end: the URLs users saved were folded into MARSFLAG's own statistics about what was worth indexing.

Somebody worked out what that meant and wrote it up in 2005. Register a URL in the bookmark service that could not plausibly be found any other way, a deliberate piece of nonsense, and it would turn up in MARSFLAG's search results the following day. The bookmark service was not a side product with a privacy footnote, it was a crawl queue with users attached.

~ where it went instead ~

In 2011 Takei and the management team completed a buyout and took the company back from its investors. The following year they announced that the portal would stop on 31 May 2012 and that the effort would go into enterprise work. The Japanese phrase used for the closure was a developmental ending, which is a generous way of saying the consumer product was being harvested for parts.

The parts did well. The same rendering engine became MARS FINDER, a site-search product, and the client list runs through Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Sharp, Honda, Shiseido, NEC, Square Enix and the Cabinet Office of Japan. Singapore office in 2013, Shanghai in 2016. Today marsflag.com answers on the www host and sells enterprise search to large companies, so the probe that says this one is dead has to be aimed carefully. The company is alive. The thing a member of the public could use died in 2012.

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