Orientation.com

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

~ the obituary ~

In 2000 Orientation ran thirty-two country doors, and they are all still listed in the archived source: Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Benin, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Haiti, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Laos, Mali, Moldova, Morocco, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand and Uganda, with four regional doors on top for Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. Turkey was not one of them. A Turkish user went in through the Middle East door, filed next to Saudi Arabia, which is more or less how the rest of the web handled us too.

That is the honest size of my connection to it, and it is also the whole reason the site is worth a grave. Orientation was built by people who had noticed that the search engines of the late nineties were an American product indexing an American web, and that if you lived outside it the answer to most queries was nothing. The 1998 front page says so without decoration: "Explore new realms beyond North America and Western Europe. Click on any region above."

It started earlier and smaller. The first archived copy, from 19 December 1996, is titled "Orientation - Asia's Web Directory" and is a hand-built category tree in the Yahoo manner, with headings for Arts and Activities, Ideas and Institutions, Business and Trade, People and Cultures. By the end of 1998 the title had changed to "Orientation: the regional search directory", the front page was announcing new arrivals the way a club announces members ("We welcome Orientation Kenya to our global network!"), and the copyright line at the bottom read The Black Box, Inc. The logo by then carried a globe and a tagline: think globally, search locally.

The machinery underneath was a real search service rather than a plain list of links. Archived URLs show a category browser and a keyword search that both took a country code and a language code as parameters, so a query ran against one country's index in one language. In August 1999 the company announced Orientation India in partnership with a-cube software, billed as the first internet portal in India available in both Hindi and English, and said it was running seventeen country-specific portals at the time. The 2000 homepage was signed in a meta tag by one Jason Wong, which is as close to a credit as the site ever gives anybody.

~ the case file ~

~ the notice that was never lifted ~

The end is bracketed tightly by the archive. On 9 July 2001 the real front page at /en/home.html was still being served, nine kilobytes of working portal. The next time anyone looked, on 25 September 2001, the root of the domain answered with six hundred bytes: the Orientation logo, a plain beige background, and three short lines of Arial.

"Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, orientation.com is temporarily off-line. We hope to return as soon as possible!" By 23 October /en/home.html was returning 404, and it returned 404 every time anybody checked for the next year and a half. The exclamation mark is the detail that stays with me, because somebody wrote that page expecting to take it down again within the week.

Dating this one honestly means admitting the notice only tells you when the site was already gone, not when it went. The portal was alive on 9 July and the apology was up by 25 September, so the failure sits somewhere in the summer of 2001, and whatever the technical difficulties were, they arrived in the same season that the money for this kind of company stopped existing.

~ what replaced it ~

In March 2003 the domain came back to life at a completely different size, and today orientation.com is a French site about choosing a school, unrelated to any of the above. The archive keeps the beige page and the globe, and a search box that once knew the difference between Mali and Moldova.

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