Pikimal

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

~ the eulogy ~

The last working capture of Pikimal's home page, 8 July 2014, offered to rank absinthes for you. A few clicks away it would do the same for ski resorts, or baby monitors. This was a US shopping product built for US shelves, and in 2014 I was an engineer in Ankara who had never typed the name into anything.

Pikimal called itself a decision engine. Instead of a text box and ten blue links, you chose a category and then moved sliders to declare how much you cared about each measurable fact: weight, price, whatever the category had numbers for. The ranking came out of those weights. The pitch behind it was that ordinary search had become a contest between marketing departments, and that a product ranking built only from published specifications could not be gamed by whoever bought the most SEO.

Eric Silver founded it in Pittsburgh in January 2010, having previously run marketing at ModCloth. The site opened in public beta that October. By April 2011 there were thirteen full-time employees plus interns and contractors scattered elsewhere, and the Pittsburgh Business Times was writing the company up as a comparison shopping site hoping to stand out in a crowded field. That last phrase is doing a lot of work. The crowd at the time included Hunch and the shopping tab of every major portal.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The front page carried a line that tells you which year it was built in: "Thousands of users have made Pikimal better. You can too", followed by a Connect with Facebook button. The data was supposed to be crowd-corrected, with users fixing the facts and the weights, and the Facebook graph was supposed to deliver the users.

The final site had 27 top-level sections holding 178 product categories, which is enough to look substantial on a home page and nowhere near enough to be where anyone starts a purchase. The spread is the tell. There are pages for absinthe and for bike locks, which is what you would expect. Then there is a page for choosing a charity, and a top-level category called Pokemon filed next to Office Equipment. There is also a page for comparing brands of birth control.

~ the pivot ~

The reason is on the record. In February 2011 Google shipped the Panda update, which changed how sites were ranked, and Pikimal's growth stopped. Eric Silver later told the Pittsburgh Business Times that one of the individual specialty searches, which the company called Pikis, had lost 95 percent of its traffic. A product whose whole argument was that it ranked things more honestly than a search engine could still only be found through one.

On 30 July 2012 the same paper ran a piece titled "Anatomy of a pivot: From Pikimal to WebKite". The company kept the engine and dropped the audience. Instead of being a destination where consumers compared products, it would white-label the technology as a content platform that any client site could run on its own domain, with the auto-generated comparison pages called kites. "I used to think it was all inside Pikimal", Silver said in that interview, which is about as clear a statement of a pivot as anyone gives a reporter.

Pikimal itself was then rebuilt to run on WebKite, as a demonstration of the platform it had turned into. WebKite kept going for another two years. In November 2014 the Post-Gazette reported it cutting staff and naming a new chief executive.

~ what the last page said ~

The shutdown is on tape. On 8 July 2014 pikimal.com still served the full site, category tree and all. By 23 September 2014 the same URL returned HTTP 403, and the page the archive captured underneath that status still carried Pikimal's old search-engine title, with a body that read: "WebKite. Future Home of a Kite. If you are the owner of this Kite, login and publish to make it visible." The dead product's domain had been handed to the platform it turned into, which filed it as an unpublished template owned by nobody.

After that it degraded in the usual order: 403s through April 2015, then 404s from that August. A 503 in March 2016 was the last thing worth capturing. Today the domain is parked and for sale, with a German-language lander on it. The sliders are the part worth remembering: a search engine whose entire premise was that you should have to say what you wanted before it told you what was best.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »