The Useless Pages

» see go2net.com/useless as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

by the time i got a modem in 1998, the useless pages were four years old and on their second keeper. i was fourteen and on 33.6k. what i actually did with a browser was hunt for things in turkish and download whatever the connection could afford, so an english-language humor directory about the pointlessness of other people's homepages was never going to get my minutes.

it started in 1994, which the site's own history page dates to a late night when paul phillips found a man who had typed his entire cd collection into a web page. the utility of that was nil and the unintentional comedy was high. phillips posted about it on usenet, other people sent him worse examples, and the list became a page. for a while it carried the subtitle america's funniest home hypermedia, which the site later admitted it had outgrown.

the criteria were written down and they were better than most editorial policies of the era. useless did not mean badly made or worthless. it meant there was no reason for this to exist on the world wide web. if you looked at a page and thought who cares, you had found a submission. the history page also records that an alarming number of people submitted their own sites, and files that under research left for a future project.

~ the record ~

~ what counted as useless ~

the directory was organized by subject and the subject list is the artifact. every heading opened with the same two words, the uselessness of, and then went on to auto-refresh, cows, domain names, guestbooks, elvis, homonymophone debates, pi and friends, star trek. this is a taxonomy of the 1995 web built by people who had read all of it, and it doubles as a survey of what a personal homepage was for before anyone had a template.

each entry got a link and one line of mockery. the greek alphabet page: this is why they never made greek alphabet soup, it is too hard to swallow. a page of buildings that resemble humans: i do not know many people who look like headless celery. the random geocities page generator: it is rumored there is even a worthwhile site hidden in there. the jokes hold up, which is more than the sites do.

~ three keepers ~

phillips ran it for about a year and then burned out on the work, which he described as coming up with new and creative ways of insulting people every day. steve berlin took over in 1995 and did most of the volume that anyone remembers. the pages moved hosts twice, from a consulting company's server to another provider's, and landed at go2net in late 1996 because phillips had taken a job there and the company wanted the audience. berlin's condition for the handoff, as phillips tells it, was that somebody finally write the history down.

john gephart iv took the chair in 1999 and introduced himself on the front page as quite proud to be taking over this fine collection of wackiness. he added a web animation section, kept the useless site of the week running, and made the last update sometime in the first half of 2001. paul phillips went on to a second career as a professional poker player, which is a considerably less useless outcome than the one he built his name on.

~ the frozen week ~

there was no closing note. on 8 february 2001 the useless site of the week was a page of popular female names from the us census. by 16 june it had changed to how much is inside, a site that measured the contents of household products. it never changed again. archived copies from october 2001, february 2002, august 2003 and april 2004 all show the same week with the same joke under it.

the url kept serving that frozen page for three years after the last human touched it, which is a particular kind of death, and then go2net repointed the address at metacrawler and the whole thing was gone in one deploy. by early 2005 typing the old path got you a search box. the site that spent seven years cataloging things with no reason to exist ended as a redirect to a product that had one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »