TheFind

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

~ the last words ~

Facebook bought TheFind on 13 March 2015 and the site went off the same week. There was no transition period, no promise to keep the service running under new management, and no migration path for the twenty million people a month who had been using it. The announcement and the obituary were the same press release.

TheFind was a shopping search engine out of Mountain View, incorporated in 2006 under the name FatLens Inc. It crawled merchant sites and also took direct product feeds, and by the end it claimed over 500 million products from more than 500,000 stores. The pitch was discovery rather than price comparison. You were not meant to arrive knowing the model number of the thing you wanted. You were meant to type "grey wool coat" and have the index be broad enough that something you had never heard of came back.

Shopping search was always a deeply national product, and that is most of why this one stayed invisible outside the United States. The index was built on American retailer feeds and American shipping, so the whole thing only made sense if your checkout ended in a US address. There was never a Turkish version of this category worth the name either. What we had instead were forum threads and sahibinden listings, which is a classifieds problem and not a catalog one.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The money arrived early. Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed and Cambrian Ventures funded the first rounds, and Bain Capital Ventures led a $15 million round in 2007. That same August the company bought Glimpse.com, a women's fashion shopping site, which pushed it further toward apparel and away from the electronics-and-model-numbers turf where Nextag and Shopping.com were fighting.

Traffic went from around 7 million monthly visitors in November 2008 to more than 20 million by May 2010, which made it the second largest shopping search engine in the country. The ranking algorithm weighted relevance and popularity and refused pay-for-placement, a position every one of its competitors had sold off years earlier.

~ the funny part ~

The engine that would not sell its ranking was bought by an advertising company to improve its advertising. Facebook said plainly that the point of the deal was better commerce targeting in the News Feed, and TechCrunch ran the headline as "buys and shuts down" because that is what happened. Nine years of refusing to let merchants pay their way to the top ended as a signal for deciding which merchants got shown to whom.

thefind.com still resolves. It redirects to facebook.com, which is about as clear a headstone as a dead startup ever gets.

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