Oshiete! goo

» see oshiete.goo.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 14 April 2025 NTT posted a notice saying Oshiete! goo would close on 17 September, and in the same notice it said there would be no data download function. Not a reduced one, not a paid one. The questions and the answers would simply stop being viewable on the morning of the seventeenth, and that was the whole plan. Twenty-four years of one country asking itself things, switched off at eleven in the morning with five months of notice.

It opened on 22 November 2000, which puts it four and a half years ahead of Yahoo Answers and a full decade ahead of Quora. It did not build its own engine to do it. The service ran on the Q&A system from OKWeb, later OKWave, and for years the two shared a question database, which meant a thread you posted on one could be read and answered on the other. Two brands, one pile of questions underneath. Japanese users worked this out early and asked about it on the site itself, which is the sort of thing a Q&A site ends up documenting about its own plumbing.

Japanese reporting on the closure put the archive at over forty million questions and answers with tens of millions of monthly visitors at its height. Those are the operator-side numbers and they are the least interesting thing in the file. What was actually in there was two decades of people asking how to word a resignation letter, whether a rash needed a doctor, what the tax office meant by a form, how to get a stain out.

That content is the most local material on the web. Search results cross borders, and a question about a specific Japanese municipal form does not. I could not read a line of it and neither could most of the people who will read this. Its disappearance is still a hole, just a hole shaped like somebody else's country.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the shared database ~

The OKWave arrangement is the part worth understanding, because it explains why the site felt bigger than its traffic. NTT did not want to build a community from nothing in 2000, so it licensed one and put the goo brand on the front. Questions flowed between the two properties and the answer count on either side benefited from both audiences.

It also created a strange kind of shared custody over the same text. When the goo side announced its shutdown, the question of what happened to the overlapping material was not a simple one, and NTT's answer was the flat one it gave to everything else that run: the goo view of it goes dark on the date.

~ the delete ~

Almost every large shutdown of the past fifteen years has shipped an export. Google does it, Facebook does it, even goo blog did it seven months later with a migration tool aimed at two named competitors. Oshiete! goo did not, and the notice was blunt about it rather than vague, which at least spared everyone the hope.

The likely reason is unglamorous. A question thread is written by one person and answered by several, and the answers belong to their authors, so packaging a clean per-user export out of a twenty-four-year community database is a legal and engineering job that nobody at a portal being dismantled was going to be funded to do. Cheaper to let the whole thing go dark on a schedule.

~ what the archivists got ~

Archive Team started an ArchiveBot job on 14 April 2025, the day of the announcement, and then ran a distributed grab with its own tracker and its own IRC channel until the deadline. The result sits in the Internet Archive under the item collection archiveteam_oshietegoo, counted in the millions of questions, gathered by volunteers with a countdown running.

It is a partial save and it is labeled as one. Nobody claims the whole site is in there. But the difference between a partial save and no save is the entire difference between a thing that can be looked at again and a thing that only exists as a sentence in a shutdown notice.

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