Nomade.fr

» see nomade.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nomade.fr sat in the part of the web i could reach and had no reason to open. It was a directory of french-language sites, written in french, for people looking for french things, and in 1999 i was a teenager in ankara typing english queries into altavista. The french web of that period was genuinely its own country, with its own portals and its own free hosts, and almost none of it crossed into turkish dial-up.

It was made by a startup called Objectif Net, set up in march 1996 by Gilles Ghesquiere and Jean Postaire, and it did not start from nothing. The seed data came from the web index kept by Urec, the network unit of the french national research agency, which had been quietly cataloging the french web while it was still small enough to catalog. Nomade.fr opened to the public on 2 july 1996.

The whole proposition was human labor. Editors read the sites and wrote a short description of each one before filing it into the tree, and by 2003 there were more than 150,000 entries done that way. People in the french search business at the time said plainly that the descriptions were the best in the language. The logo carried the line "le guide qui trouve", the guide that finds, and for a few years that was not a boast. It was true right up until it stopped mattering, because a machine that reads every page badly beats a person who reads a few hundred pages well.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

For its first years Nomade was one of the two names that meant search in france, the other being Voila. Both were directories with a tree of categories rather than engines, and both assumed a web small enough to have a table of contents. That assumption held for about four years.

Then the money arrived. Libertysurf bought Nomade, and when the italian group Tiscali took Libertysurf over, Nomade became Tiscali's search product in france and got renamed on the page to match. The engine results behind the directory were switched off Google and onto Fast under a pan-european deal, which is the kind of decision made about a directory by people who are actually running an internet provider.

~ the decline ~

The first visible sign was small and completely legible. In november 2003 the links that let you submit a site to the directory quietly disappeared, and the french search press read that correctly straight away: a directory that will not accept new sites has been switched from a product into an archive. Tiscali was in the middle of a restructuring and never announced anything. It did not need to.

After that the name just kept being reassigned. The page title went from Tiscali Recherche to Alice ADSL Recherche when Tiscali's french business was sold on and rebranded, and the directory underneath stayed frozen, still listing sites that had been described by hand years earlier. The last archived versions of it are from 2009, still carrying the Nomade name on top of someone else's broadband brand.

~ the long tail ~

What died with Nomade was not a search engine. It was the last serious french attempt at an edited web, the idea that a country's internet could have librarians. Every directory that tried it ran into the same wall at roughly the same time, and the ones that survived did so by becoming portals, which meant becoming homepages full of horoscopes and weather.

The 150,000 descriptions are the loss. Somebody wrote every one of them, about a web that mostly no longer exists, and there is no copy of that work anywhere you can read it now.

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