Spezify

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

~ the obit ~

Spezify was a search engine that refused to make a list. You typed a word and it threw back a two-dimensional field of photographs and tweets, scattered across a canvas you could drag around in any direction. Nothing was ranked first and nothing was ranked tenth.

It came out of Stockholm, built by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson as a side project alongside a Swedish digital agency. The site put up a countdown page in the spring of 2009 promising a beta in May, and by 9 June it was carrying a specific commitment: official public release on the fifteenth of June 2009. It made that date. The thing underneath was a Flash application, which was standard practice in 2009.

The press liked it immediately for the reason it was built. Fred Wilson wrote it up that August, The Next Web had covered it in May, and it spent the next couple of years turning up in the kind of article that collects unusual search engines. Designers used it as a mood board. School librarians wrote about it as a way of showing students that a search result is a choice somebody made rather than a fact about the world.

Then, in March 2013, the people who made it put it down. The last tweet from the Spezify account went out on the seventeenth. The homepage file was edited for the last time on the eighteenth and never touched again. Nothing was announced, and nothing visibly changed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the canvas ~

The argument Spezify made was quiet but it was an argument. A ranked list tells you that result one beat result two, and most of the time nobody can tell you why. A scattered canvas declines to make that claim. It hands you everything at once and leaves the ordering to your eyes, which is slower and much worse for finding a phone number.

That made it a weak product and a sharp instrument. It was never going to take queries away from anybody, and the people who kept using it were looking at the shape of an answer more than reading one.

~ the squatter ~

What happened after March 2013 is the part worth recording. The site did not break. It kept serving the same frozen files, with the same timestamps, answering live queries for anyone who wandered in, for six years with nobody behind it. Archive crawls through 2016 show the same two page fingerprints over and over. As late as 27 March 2019 the JavaScript files were still returning clean.

Five days later it was gone. On 1 April 2019 the homepage and the robots file both came back 503 with one line of body text: This site has been suspended. That is a hosting company's generic notice, not a message from anyone who worked there. The account flickered back on twice that summer, serving the same unchanged pre-2013 files, and then stopped for good. By October 2020 the domain was showing a parking page from one.com reading that the web space had expired.

A squatter picked it up in June 2021, and spezify.com now answers with a 403 and bounces you to a people-search operation. None of that is Spezify. The timing has one last joke in it: Adobe pulled Flash out of every browser at the end of December 2020, which was going to kill the thing on its own about twenty-one months later. The hosting bill got there first.

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