Nigma

» see nigma.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Nigma searched in Russian for people who read Russian, and I do not read Russian. That is the entire distance here and there is no point dressing it up. What pulled me into reading about it anyway was a feature list that sounds like something a search engine would ship in 2024 and not in 2008.

Viktor Lavrenko and Vladimir Chernyshov met in 2004 at the faculty of computational mathematics and cybernetics at Moscow State University. They put Nigma online on 12 April 2005. It had no crawler and no index, which was a deliberate choice rather than a shortcut. It sent your query to Google and Yandex and several others at once, then clustered the returned results by meaning so you could pick the sense of the word you actually wanted before reading anything.

The clustering came with academic help from two MSU faculties, computational mathematics for the machinery and psychology for the part about how people read a results page. Chernyshov spent 2007 at Stanford working under Hector Garcia-Molina, whose other students had built the ranking algorithm Nigma was querying.

~ the record ~

~ what it could do ~

From 2008 Nigma began solving things instead of finding them. Type an equation and it solved it. Type a chemical reaction with a gap in it and it balanced the reaction, which nobody else on the open web was doing at all. Derivatives and integrals arrived in 2009 and function graphing in 2010. A definitions system came in 2013.

This is why its user base skewed young. Russian schoolchildren and university students had a homework machine at a public address, several years before Wolfram Alpha made the same idea famous in English and about a decade before Google put a calculator with any ambition into its results. The rest of the product was more ordinary: search across music and torrent sites, and a currency converter that worked.

~ the market it was in ~

Nigma never got past roughly a tenth of a percent of Russian search. It was competing against Yandex, which is one of the very few search engines anywhere that beat Google at home and kept beating it, and Nigma's own results were partly Yandex results with a layer on top.

In the summer of 2008 Yuri Milner's Digital Sky Technologies bought a minority stake, which was the standard Runet signal that a project had been noticed by people with money. The stake bought Nigma some years and no market share. Countries that kept a domestic search engine are the exception rather than the rule. Turkey is not one of them and neither is most of Europe, and the ones that managed it did so by owning the whole portal rather than by being cleverer at the algorithm.

~ the night it stopped answering ~

On 19 September 2017 nigma.ru went unreachable. So did its Cyrillic domain. There was no notice on the site and no announcement anywhere else. On 23 September the Russian business paper Kommersant asked Lavrenko about it and he said the project was still profitable and that closing it was not under discussion.

Then it stayed down. Whatever the answer was, it was never given publicly, and the twelve year old search engine that could balance a chemical equation went out with the founder on record saying nothing was wrong. A fan later rebuilt the front page at another address, which is the internet equivalent of a headstone with the right dates and nobody underneath it.

~ where its founder went ~

Lavrenko had already moved on to the thing that worked. He took the same idea, a local search product built against a market Google had not bothered to tailor for, and applied it in Vietnam under the name Coc Coc, with German publishing money behind it. Coc Coc became a browser more than a search engine and it is still there.

That is the useful reading of Nigma. Being smarter than the incumbent in the incumbent's strongest market gets you a tenth of a percent and a decade of interesting features nobody rewards. The founder learned it and got out with the lesson intact.

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