Voilà

» see voila.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Voilà was the default homepage and search engine for almost every dial-up internet account in france from about 1999 to 2005. France Telecom, which had a near-monopoly on dial-up at the time, set Voilà as the homepage on every browser they shipped to subscribers. So if you signed up for internet through France Telecom, Voilà was the first thing you saw every time you opened internet explorer.

This is mostly outside my own experience. I am turkish, born in 1984, and i never used Voilà for anything. But every french person i have ever talked to who is older than 30 has mentioned it as the thing that meant "the internet" to them when they were younger. It was their google before google. It was their gmail before gmail. The french teenage internet of the late 1990s went through Voilà.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

Voilà was a portal in the late-1990s sense. The homepage had a search box at the top, and below it a long page of categorized links. News headlines, sport scores, weather, stock quotes for french companies, tv listings, weather. The whole left side was a directory of categories you could click into. Sport, politique, culture, voyage, finance.

It also had a webmail service, voila.fr email addresses, and a news aggregator. There were chat rooms in the early 2000s. A discussion forum system. A map service. A version of yellow pages for france. The same kit that altavista, lycos, and yahoo were each running their own versions of in their own markets.

The search engine was actually decent for french-language results. It had its own crawler and its own ranking. By the early 2000s it was already losing to google for searches in english, but for french-only queries it was fine for a while.

~ how it died ~

Google killed Voilà the way google killed most national portals. Once french users tried google for a few searches, they did not go back. Google's results were cleaner, faster, and more relevant. Voilà's homepage with its directory and ads started looking dated by 2003 or 2004.

France Telecom kept the site running for a long time after it had stopped being culturally relevant. The brand had been part of their pitch to dial-up subscribers. Once dial-up died, the reason to keep Voilà as the default homepage also died. By around 2010 the site was already a ghost. France Telecom, by then renamed Orange, eventually shut it down in stages between 2015 and 2018.

The actual full shutdown was almost unnoticed. By 2018 most of the original audience had been on google for ten or fifteen years.

~ what is left ~

Voilà is the canonical example of a national web portal that lost. Italy had Virgilio. Germany had T-Online. Spain had Terra. Each of these had their moment as the default homepage in their country, and each of them got eaten by google plus the global services in the early to mid 2000s.

For french users of a certain age, Voilà is shorthand for the early personal internet. It is in the same memory bracket as ICQ, MSN, and dial-up modems. It is the kind of thing they sometimes mention when they want to date themselves online. The site is gone but the brand still has cultural weight in france.