Pogodak

» see pogodak.hr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Pogodak means a hit, the opposite of a miss. The letter o in the wordmark was drawn as a red and white target, and under the search box sat two words in Croatian, Traži pametnije, meaning search smarter. That was a polite way of claiming it knew the local web better than the American engine did, and for a couple of years the claim held up.

The company behind it was Interseek, a Slovenian outfit that already ran Najdi.si, the search engine Slovenians actually used instead of Google. Pogodak was the export version. It went up in October 2004 and spread across the rest of the former Yugoslavia under one name. The Serbian edition lived at pogodak.co.yu, because the .rs domain did not exist yet and Serbia was still sharing a top-level domain with a country that had dissolved.

What it sold was locality. The front page counted 13.2 million Croatian internet documents in the index and carried its own tabs for multimedia and for webmail. A blog service sat beside them still wearing a beta badge, and a line at the bottom asked you to make Pogodak your home page. None of that was unusual for 2006. The unusual part was that a crawler serving a region of five or six million potential users was being built and maintained at all.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was good at ~

Its best feature was multimedia search. By late 2006 Pogodak had indexed more than two million media files sitting on Serbian servers, and it could filter them by extension, about twenty image formats against nine video ones. For audio it read the artist and the track title out of the file and printed them next to the link. Six months of query logs then told the company what everybody had already guessed. People searched for music, and what they mostly meant by music was a phone ringtone.

That is the honest description of what a regional search engine was for in 2006, and it was no different in Turkey. The Turkish attempt at a local engine ran on the same logic and got the same queries, in a market roughly ten times larger, and Google had taken the default position there too before anyone finished building anything.

A crawler you pay for yourself is a strange product to sell against a free one that is already better at everything except the last hundred kilometers.

~ who bought it ~

In 2007 Telekom Slovenije signed for seventy five percent of Interseek at 8.55 million euros, picking up Najdi.si and every Pogodak edition in the same deal. The remaining shares went over in 2009. On paper this was the moment a small search company got a parent with real money behind it.

What happened instead was that the money stayed on the Slovenian side. Jan Jilek, who had run Pogodak from October 2004 until April 2007 and handed it on to Mladen Mileusnić and then Marina Tot, put it plainly years later: the main problem was a lack of technical investment, which kept the Croatian engine from advancing the way the Slovenian one could. Najdi.si is still answering queries at its own domain today. The Croatian and Serbian engines got three more years.

~ the day it stopped ~

On 1 September 2010 the crawler stopped and the index froze. There was no farewell page and no announcement worth the name, which fits a product whose owner had already decided it was a line item. Several other regional engines went dark in the same month.

Both domains are occupied today by other people. Type pogodak.rs into a browser and you get a search page that looks roughly like the original, except the results come from a Google custom search box with advertising around it, and the footer says copyright 2013. Type pogodak.hr and you get a Croatian content farm publishing beauty tips next to casino pages.

The target logo is gone from both. A name that once meant a company was crawling your country's web now means somebody renting ad space in front of Google's results, which is the argument of 2010 settled in favor of the side that never had to build anything.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »