Scoopler

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

~ the last words ~

Scoopler opened to a private beta in April 2009, built by founders who had come through Y Combinator and wanted to point a search box at Twitter while Twitter was still talking. Ordinary search indexed pages that had settled. Scoopler indexed the ones that had not. Type a word into it and back came whatever was being posted about that word right then, pulled mostly off Twitter and Digg, with the results still moving while you read them.

That October it closed a seed round reported at between half and one million dollars. Ron Conway put money in. So did Michael Birch, who had co-founded Bebo and sold it to AOL the year before. Total money into the company over its whole life came to roughly one million dollars, which in 2009 was enough to build a real-time index and not nearly enough to work out who would pay for one.

That was the problem, and every company in the 2009 live-search race hit the same wall. A real-time index made a beautiful demo and a terrible business. Twitter was building its own search and handing it out free, and nobody had an answer for who buys a result that is worthless four minutes later. I was not on Twitter in 2009 and nearly nobody I knew in Ankara was, so the live stream all of these companies were racing to index was an anglophone stream, and the Turkish one did not get large for another three or four years.

~ the record ~

~ the celebrity pivot ~

In October 2010 Scoopler stopped being a search engine. The last working search page the Internet Archive holds is dated 9 October. By the 15th the same domain was serving assets for something called JustSpotted, and by the 19th scoopler.com was redirecting there outright.

JustSpotted did one thing. It told you where a famous person had most recently been seen, assembled out of the same live-social plumbing that had been running the search engine. The farewell note called it "the #1 website for finding out where your favorite celebrities were last spotted," which was a strange destination for a company that had opened by claiming a first in web infrastructure.

~ the last page they uploaded ~

The archive holds the ending. A capture from 18 July 2011 is the live product at 31 KB. The next one, from 29 August, is 2.6 KB, and it is a letter.

The headline reads "JustSpotted for the last time." The body thanks the investors and the advisers, says the team is moving on to new challenges, and carries three signatures: AJ Asver, Dilan Jayawardane and Benjamin Tauber, founders of Scoopler Inc.

One detail in that file is worth keeping. Its last-modified header says 22 July, two days after every news report of the shutdown, which would ordinarily make the reports wrong. They are not. TechCrunch wrote on 20 July that the founders were shutting down both services "as they note on their site," so the note was already up that day and the later timestamp is a re-upload of a page that had already said goodbye.

~ the thing google did not buy ~

Google did not acquire Scoopler. It hired the three people who built it, which is a different transaction with a different shape, and the company itself was simply switched off on the way out. Both scoopler.com and justspotted.com closed on 20 July 2011, and the founders moved onto Google+, a product that would earn its own grave eight years later.

Scoopler, Inc. had existed since June 2008 by its founders' own count. It built a real-time search engine it could not sell and replaced it with a celebrity tracker. The ending arrived because the people who had built both were handed better jobs, which, among the dozen or so companies chasing live search in 2009, counts as a soft landing.

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