Volunia

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

~ the obit ~

Every country had a year when somebody announced the Google killer. Turkey had Arabul and Netbul in the window before the question was settled here the way it was settled everywhere else. Italy's turn came late, in 2012, and it came with a name behind it that made people take the announcement seriously for about four months.

Massimo Marchiori is a real researcher with a real claim. He teaches in Padua and worked on the standards side of the web at W3C. His 1997 paper on hyper search sits in the citation trail that runs into PageRank. When a man with that history says he has been quietly building a search engine, the Italian press does not treat it as another startup.

Volunia opened as an invite beta on 6 February 2012, in twelve languages, made by a team of fourteen people working out of Padua with servers hosted by Tiscali in Sardinia. The launch event was covered like a national story. For a few weeks it was possible to believe that a fourteen-person operation in the Veneto was about to take something back from Mountain View.

From outside Italy this was a press story rather than a product. That is the honest position I was in and probably the position most people were in, including plenty of Italians. The beta went to registered power users first, which meant almost nobody could actually try the thing everyone was writing about.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

Volunia was not selling better ranking. It was selling a second layer on top of the result. You could fly over a rendering of a site laid out as a map, seeing its shape rather than its front page, and every page you landed on had a social surface attached where visitors could leave opinions or talk to whoever else was there.

Google had already run that experiment. Sidewiki launched in 2009 with a comment layer over every page on the web, and Google switched it off in 2011 for lack of anyone using it. Volunia's version arrived the year after Google gave up on the idea, which nobody in the coverage seemed to want to mention.

~ the letter ~

On 8 June 2012 Marchiori published an open letter saying he had been excluded from his own project. The man whose reputation was the entire reason anyone had heard of Volunia was no longer running it.

Six days later, on 14 June 2012, the site went public anyway. A product whose only real asset was a founder's credibility launched without the founder, into a market that had spent four months waiting and had already started to lose interest. Whatever was left after that was a website with a map feature.

~ what it became ~

It stopped operating in February 2014. The record of exactly how is thin, which tells you most of what you need to know about how much traffic there was to explain the loss of. Twenty months of public life, and the interesting part had happened before any of it started.

Marchiori went back to research and to Padua. The lesson that keeps getting relearned is not that Google cannot be beaten on search, it is that people do not want to talk to strangers on top of a search result. Sidewiki proved it and Volunia paid to prove it a second time. Comment layers over the open web still turn up every few years with a new name on them.

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