Shareware.com

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

~ the obit ~

Shareware.com went live in November 1995 as a standalone CNET site, and for about five years it was the best way to find a program on the internet. It did not host software. It indexed the archives that did, several hundred of them, from the big public FTP collections down to vendor directories at Adobe and Borland and Intel that had been reorganized specifically so the thing could read them.

The pitch on the front page was blunt for 1996: the way to find shareware on the Internet. You picked a platform from a dropdown that ran from MS-Windows 3.x through OS2, Amiga and Atari, typed a word, and got back a list of every copy of that file anywhere, with the archive it lived in named next to it. The site's own About page put the catalog at over 160,000 files. Later counts ran past 170,000.

What made it usable rather than merely large was a feature almost nobody builds anymore. The database was copied out to mirror sites called front desks, spread across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, each running the same search against the same nightly-updated index. You searched the one nearest you. On a 33.6k line in Turkey in 1998 that distinction was not a nicety, it was the difference between a page loading and a page timing out.

By the time I was hunting for a zip file over dial-up, though, the site people around me actually typed was Download.com, and the other one was Tucows. Shareware.com was already the older brother nobody mentioned, which is a strange fate for a service that had been the first of the two to exist.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the engine came from ljubljana ~

The Virtual Software Library was created by Dr. Ziga Turk, a professor at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, who wanted a uniform index across shareware archives so that finding a file did not require knowing which FTP server it sat on. He presented the design at the Third International WWW Conference in Darmstadt in 1995. The service got popular fast enough to overload his host machine, so he started exporting the database to other servers around the world, which is where the front desks came from.

In June 1995 the master site moved to CNET and became part of cnet.com. CNET added vendor archives, widened the search, and rolled the whole thing out under its own name five months later. Turk kept working with the CNET engineering staff afterward. He went on to become a Slovenian government minister, which is not a career arc the shareware era produced very often.

~ the sibling that won ~

CNET launched Download.com on 23 October 1996, almost a year after shareware.com, and it worked the opposite way. Download.com hosted the files itself, which meant it could put an ad on the page, count the download, and guarantee the link worked. Shareware.com pointed you at somebody else's server and could guarantee none of that.

For a while CNET ran both, cross-linked in the same navigation bar with News.com and Search.com. Then the shareware site stopped being redesigned. Look at the front page in 2005 and again in 2011 and it is recognizably the same layout with newer ad code bolted into it, still listing Spybot and WinRAR and Winamp in the same row of shortcut links, still saying "search for shareware programs and free software" in the same lowercase strip.

~ 3 april 2012 ~

The last working capture of shareware.com is 3 April 2012, CBS Interactive ad globals and all. One week later, on 10 April, the same URL answered with a 301 to download.cnet.com. There was no post, no farewell page, no mention in the trade press. The URL simply started meaning something else.

The domain did not stay with CBS. By mid-2013 shareware.com was a stranger's AdSense page headed "ShareWare.com | Search for your the Shareware you need," grammar included, and by October a PAD-file submission farm with a SUBMIT PAD FREE banner. In 2014 and 2015 it redirected to software.com. From 2016 it was a Sedo parking page offering to sell you the name. Today it will not complete a TLS handshake at all.

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