Shvoong

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

~ the obituary ~

Write and earn sat in the navigation bar, and that was most of the business model. Shvoong opened in 2005 out of Israel, calling itself the global source for summaries and reviews, and what it sold was short: a book or an article boiled down to a few hundred words by somebody who had actually read it, in whatever language that person wrote in. Contributors took a share of the advertising their summaries brought in.

The engineering underneath was aimed at search engines, and not only at Google. The analytics on the last working version of the front page declare organic traffic from Tiscali, Sapo, Soso, Youdao, Sogou, Rambler, Walla, Tapuz and t-online, which is to say the search boxes of Italy, Portugal, China, Russia, Israel and Germany. Shvoong wanted to be the summary result in all of them at the same time.

It also ran Tynt, the service that quietly appended a source line to any text you copied off a page, with a separate key for each language. There was a handler wired to the copy and cut events that fired a tracking pixel when you used them. A site assembled entirely out of other people's books was watching very closely to see whether you were about to do the same thing to it.

I do not remember using it, and I would not expect to. Shvoong was the kind of result you arrived at rather than a site you set out for, and by the middle of the 2000s the Turkish half of my search results was full of the same species, pages assembled to match a query and monetized on the way past. What I recognize here is the shape rather than the name.

The end is not written down anywhere. The Internet Archive was crawling shvoong.com every few days through the summer of 2014, and the last capture with the actual site on it is 13 September 2014. After that there is nothing at all for eleven months. When the crawler returned on 22 August 2015 the domain was answering Non-Existent Domain, which means nobody had renewed it.

~ the case file ~

~ the deal ~

The offer to writers was that what you knew had a price if you compressed it properly. You picked something you had read, wrote it up short, and collected a cut of whatever advertising revenue it generated for as long as people kept landing on it. In 2005 that was a new proposition to most people, and because it ran in many languages at once it reached students and hobbyists in places where nobody was offering to pay for writing of any kind.

~ what it was made of ~

The categories were broad enough to absorb anything. Books came first, broken down into novels and biographies and thrillers and best sellers and science fiction and romance, and the other subjects were organized the same way. The line on the books page was that we have it all, which on a summary site is a claim about coverage rather than about depth.

~ the squat ~

shvoong.com answers today. What sits on it is a WordPress install titled Shvoong.com, Interesting Articles From Interesting People, running Yoast SEO and publishing nothing that anyone who wrote for the original would recognize. Somebody picked up the lapsed domain and is renting out whatever search authority it still carries.

The summaries went with the DNS record. Whatever was written there in a stack of languages between 2005 and 2014 now survives only where the Internet Archive happened to be pointing on the day.

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