Ozú

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

~ the obituary ~

Every country that got online before Google worked had one of these: a directory in the local language, run by local people, because the American indexes handled accented words badly and had almost nothing from your country in them anyway. Turkey had Arabul, then Mynet. Spain had Olé and Ozú, both from 1996, and Ozú took its name from an Andalusian exclamation, which tells you how deliberately local the project was.

It started as a search service and became a portal, because that was the only trajectory on offer. By the middle of the 2000s the box on the front page was returning results it had bought in, from Google and from Noxtrum, the short lived index run by Spain's Yellow Pages company. What kept people arriving was the community wrapped around it, and above everything else that meant the chat rooms.

Vocento, the newspaper group behind ABC, bought Ozú in 2001 and put around 1.5 million euros into developing it. In 2008 the site moved to La Factoría de Información, the Vocento subsidiary that also published the free daily Qué.es, and from then on ozu.es wore Qué's logo in its header. In the first days of November 2012 La Factoría issued a statement saying the site would close at the end of that month. It went dark on 30 November, thanking users for the confidence they had shown in "el portal de contenidos de ocio".

~ the case file ~

~ what a portal was for ~

It is easy to read a site like this now as a search engine that lost. It had stopped competing with Google well before 2005 and knew it. What it remained, for about a decade, was the page a Spanish speaker on a dial up line opened first, and the reason they stayed was that other Spanish speakers were in the rooms.

The closure notice is a good inventory of what a portal meant in 2012 Spain. Community and chat, video chat, voice chat, a paid VIP tier, forums, games, humor, video, shopping, news, postcards, blogs, downloads. All of it under one login, all of it going off on the same evening.

~ the sixteen year decline ~

The arc has a shape you can date. Ozú was a search engine that grew a community, then a community with somebody else's search engine bolted onto the front of it, and finally an asset sitting on a newspaper group's balance sheet with no plan attached. Vocento spent the late 2000s working out what a print publisher does with a leisure portal, and the answer it arrived at in November 2012 was to switch it off and keep Qué.

~ what is at the address now ~

ozu.es did not stay empty for long. Within a couple of years the domain was serving a software and Android app download portal with no connection to any of the above, and it kept that going for years afterward under a name sixteen years of Spanish internet users had earned for something else. The domain does not resolve at all now.

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