Surfingbird

» see surfingbird.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

You pressed a button and Surfingbird gave you one page. Not a feed and not a list of ten blue links, a single page, picked for you and handed over whole. You rated it and pressed again. Everything the service knew about you came out of that one gesture repeated a few hundred times, and the more you pressed the closer the pages got to the thing you would not have known how to search for.

Dmitry Shalashov and Sergey Shalaev built it. Both had come out of Mail.ru, where they had worked on the company's blogging platform, and they launched Surfingbird in March 2011 into a Russian web that had plenty of portals and almost nothing that behaved like a slot machine for reading. Within a year it was past a million visitors. The money followed the numbers: four hundred thousand dollars to start, then two and a half million in 2012 from Russian and French angels, then twenty five thousand in March 2013 from Start Fellows, the fund Pavel Durov ran with Yuri Milner.

The thing that made it work in Russia was that it had to index Russian. StumbleUpon was a good product in English and an empty room in Cyrillic. Surfingbird crawled the Runet on its own terms, which is why it could keep going after the original wave of American discovery tools had come and gone.

~ the case file ~

~ the pivot that outlived it ~

In 2015 the team shipped Relap.io, which took the recommendation engine and sold it to publishers as a widget for the bottom of their articles. That was the business. A consumer site where people press a button for fun is a hard thing to charge for, and the same math underneath it becomes an enterprise product the moment you point it at somebody else's traffic.

Mail.ru Group bought Relap. Shalaev stayed and went on to run Pulse, Mail.ru's recommendation feed, which is the shape Surfingbird's technology took for the rest of its life. The company got acquired around the product, and the product was what did not come along.

~ the block ~

Turkey had its own version of the blocking story in those years, so the mechanics here were familiar to me long before I had heard of this site. On 22 December 2017 the Moscow City Court issued an order against Surfingbird as a preliminary measure in a copyright suit, and Roskomnadzor enforced it the following month. A recommendation engine is a machine for pointing at other people's pages, which makes it permanently one complaint away from being treated as the thing it points at.

The site had already had a taste of how thin the ground was. On 5 February 2016 the registrar Reg.ru stopped delegating the domain and Surfingbird simply vanished for a while, killed by paperwork rather than by anything technical.

~ the last screen ~

On 16 July 2019, at 14:30 Moscow time, surfingbird.ru stopped serving and put up a line saying the project was being prepared for a relaunch. There was no post, no thank you and no export. Just a maintenance notice with no end date on it.

Seven years later the domain does not answer at all. Somewhere in the archive sits a version of that front page still promising the relaunch, which is a more honest artifact than any farewell post. Nothing here was decided. It was left.

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