reegle

» see reegle.info as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

reegle, lower case on purpose, was a search engine for renewable energy. It launched in July 2006, built by REEEP and REN21 in Vienna with funding from several European government agencies, and it existed because the open web was bad at this one subject. Searching for a country's feed-in tariff in 2006 returned consultancy brochures and press releases from companies selling turbines.

The center of it was a search engine with a mind-map refinement tool, which let you narrow a query by clicking through related concepts rather than guessing at better keywords. Alongside that sat a clickable world map: pick a country and get its energy statistics alongside the ministries responsible for them. Fast Company ran a piece in 2009 asking whether this was Google for renewable energy. At its peak REEEP counted 220,000 visitors a month.

It was never a business, which is the entire reason it lasted thirteen years. A commercial vertical search engine pulling those numbers gets sold or switched off inside three. reegle was donor-funded infrastructure, so it ran for exactly as long as somebody kept renewing the line item.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the vocabulary underneath ~

Under the portal was a thesaurus. reegle published a glossary of roughly 4,000 clean energy and climate terms assembled from open data sources, translated many of them into additional languages, and exposed the whole structure as linked open data at data.reegle.info. There was a tagging API so that other organizations could classify their own documents against the same vocabulary, which is the part that made it infrastructure rather than a website.

A 2011 paper in Springer's Environmental Software Systems series described data.reegle.info as a new key portal for open energy data. In April 2015 the project added reegle Translate, announced in a press release whose headline carried the words for climate change in four languages at once.

~ who it was actually for ~

This was built for ministries and development banks. The audience reegle named for itself was governments and finance institutions, with the general public listed politely at the end of the sentence. I work on computer vision for drones and the only route I would ever have taken to reegle is a search result whose source I did not look at, which is the normal condition of reference infrastructure. The people it served well mostly could not have told you its name either.

~ how it ended ~

There was no announcement. On 2 July 2019 the address was still serving its normal front page, titled "Clean Energy Info Portal - reegle", about 4,900 bytes of it. By 3 August the same address returned 460 bytes, and those bytes were a frameset whose only job was to display a page on reeep.org inside a borderless frame. The search engine was gone and the domain had been demoted to a signpost.

Neither end of the signpost works now. reegle.info is a parked domain that bounces visitors to a sales lander, and the REEEP page it used to frame returns a 404. What REEEP says about the portal today is that it is no longer active and that anyone wanting the data it held should write to the organization and ask. Thirteen years of country profiles now live behind an email address.

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