Surfers Paradise (サーパラ)

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

~ the eulogy ~

It was not a search engine when it opened. On 30 May 1996 it was a list of links called Comic Network, kept by hand by a graduate student at Keio University who signed himself kura. The engine came that September and the name Surfersparadise came in January 1997. The site carried both dates in its footer image for the next eighteen years, so you could read its whole origin off the bottom of any page.

What it became was the place Japanese fans went to find each other. You submitted your homepage and a human being looked at it. If it passed you were listed under a genre, anything from manga and anime through to doujin work. The genre list itself was built by request over two decades, so by 2015 it ran to roughly 2,500 tags, from the 1997 vintage of RPG and fighting games through to Touhou and Kantai Collection. For the years before pixiv and before social networks, this was the index.

On 13 July 2015 at 18:58 the company posted a notice saying the registered-site search would end on the 24th, with new submissions closing on the 16th. It thanked people for their long patronage and gave no reason. The front page still looked normal on the morning of the 24th, at 13,421 bytes. The copy taken the next day is 2,356 bytes, and all that survives on it is the notice.

~ the dossier ~

~ comic network, and the machine in the lab ~

The site's own FAQ, written while it was still one person's project, explains the name without any ceremony: 「語源は大学の研究室のマシン名です」, the origin is the name of a machine in my university research lab. The same page admits that the database got updated late whenever he was away traveling or out with friends, complete with a sheepish emoticon. It also states plainly that Surfersparadise was his personal page and had no connection to any organization.

That lasted until February 2000, when it began trading as a company under Ima Corporation. It was shuffled between two group subsidiaries over the next three years before being re-established under its own name in December 2004. The office ended up in Kuramae, in Taito ward. Somewhere in that corporate rearrangement the thing stopped being a student's side project, but the listings kept working the same way.

~ how you got listed ~

Registration was free for personal sites and 500 yen a month if you were commercial. Approval was explicitly subjective: the rules said outright that a submission might not be published if the administrator judged it unsuitable, and the published grounds for refusal included pages with nothing on them yet and anything too extreme. The later promise was a listing within 48 hours for anything that qualified, with no confirmation email either way.

The ranking ran on banners. You ticked a box, put a 200 by 40 image on your own site linking back with your registration number in the query string, and your click count accumulated through the month before being wiped on the last day so that new entries were not permanently buried. Cheating was handled by hand. The administrator wrote that he had set traps, and that pages caught badly enough got their counters reset or their registration deleted outright.

This part I recognize from a distance, because the mechanics were the same everywhere in those years. A banner with a counter behind it, and somebody's judgment about whether you belonged in the list. Turkish sites ran on the same arrangement and so did everyone else's. What is specific to Surfersparadise is that one person was still personally approving entries into a directory of forty thousand sites.

~ forty-four thousand and one ~

The site published its own size for years, and the curve is unusually complete. In December 1997 it claimed over 2,300 registered sites. By August 1999 it was over 7,700. June 2000 put it at 21,000, with more than 40,000 visits a day, and April 2002 at 36,711. The last figure it ever printed on the front page was 44,001, on 30 May 2003, which happened to be the site's seventh birthday. After that the counter came off the page and never went back.

The rest of the numbers are press clippings from the first boom. It took fourth place in Nikkei Net's homepage ranking for the manga and anime category, and it counted roughly two dozen magazine write-ups between 1997 and 2000. It also ran an illustration contest called Miss Surfersparadise from 1999 to 2011.

~ what the company did instead ~

By the end the business was merchandise. The company sold anime and game goods and produced Touhou Project items. The directory had become one surviving wing of a firm whose own meta description called it a shopping site. A sibling product, the doujin download store, ended on exactly the same day as the directory, but that one was handed to another operator and reopened as Torcell on 3 August rather than closing.

The shop outlasted the index by four years. The company wound down its sales site in October 2019 and completed liquidation on 24 December 2020. The domain still answers today. What loads is an Apache2 Ubuntu default page, which means somebody switched a machine on and never pointed anything at it.

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