Olé

» see ole.es as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I knew Terra as a name. Anyone reading about the european internet of that period runs into it, the Spanish giant that Telefónica floated in 1999 and quietly killed in 2017. What I did not know until this week is that Terra started as a search engine called Olé, that Olé opened on the first day of 1996, and that it therefore predates Google by two and a half years.

The acronym stood for Ordenamientos de Links Especializados, which nobody ever said out loud. It went live at ole.es with about two thousand entries, pulled out of more than fifty thousand pages that had been looked at, and it was the first search engine anyone could use in Castilian. Six months later the index had doubled. The visit counter went from roughly thirty-five thousand in January to over a million by the spring.

In 1996 I was twelve years old and two years away from my first modem, so this one is at a clean distance from me in both time and language. What holds my attention is not the product. It is that a public research foundation built a national asset, decided it was not in the business of running one, and sold it for the price of a used car.

~ the dossier ~

~ the basement years ~

The Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca was a public body of the Generalitat, and Pep Vallés worked there. His pitch was that a search engine would push Catalan companies onto the internet faster than any grant program would, and the foundation paid for it. Josep Gaspa is named alongside him as co-author of the idea.

Political pressure over a public foundation operating a commercial website arrived quickly, and in the middle of 1996 the FCR sold the rights to Vallés and Gaspa for two hundred thousand pesetas, roughly twelve hundred euro in today's money. From June of that year Olé ran out of a basement under a nursery school owned by Vallés's mother, with Jordi Durán as the third person on the team. By 1998 it was the third most visited website in Spain, behind Yahoo and the online edition of El País.

~ the sale ~

Telefónica came for it in early 1999, at around five million visits a month, and signed in March. The reported structure was about two thousand million pesetas for the technology plus rights to stock in a new company Telefónica was assembling. The whole package was valued near three thousand four hundred million pesetas at signature. When that new company floated in November 1999 as Terra Networks, the same package was worth something in the region of thirty thousand million.

Then Terra bought Lycos in 2000, and Lycos brought its own search engine. Olé's index was not what Telefónica had wanted. The traffic was. So the engine was replaced with the acquired one, the brand was folded into the portal, and the first search engine in Spanish disappeared as a product while its audience carried on being counted.

~ the funny part ~

The numbers made a scandal that outlived the website. A publicly funded project had been handed to two private individuals for two hundred thousand pesetas and resold within three years for four figures more than that, and by late 2000 El País had the search engine valued at three thousand million. In 2002 prosecutors were looking at indications of fraud and tax irregularities around profits routed to entities abroad.

Nobody in that story was doing anything unusual for 1996. Public bodies genuinely did not know what they were holding, and neither did anybody else. The reason it looks obscene in hindsight is that we now know what a national search index turned out to be worth, and the people selling it were pricing a directory of two thousand links.

~ the inheritance ~

Terra ran for another seventeen years on the audience Olé assembled, went through the Lycos merger and the delisting of July 2005, and closed for good in 2017. ole.es does not resolve at all in 2026, which puts it in a smaller category than most graves here: not parked, not redirected, not squatted. Just gone from the record entirely.

The pattern is the one every country outside the United States lived through in the same decade. Somebody local builds the index first, because they are the only ones who understand the language and the sites in it, and then the local telephone company buys them to have a portal, and then the portal buys a foreign engine because building search turns out to be harder than buying it. Spain got there four years ahead of most of Europe and still ended up in the same place.

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