Xaphir

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

~ the last words ~

Xaphir would not answer a question asked in Turkish, and it would not answer one asked in English either. Type anything that was not French and you got an error message. That was a deliberate product decision and not a missing feature, so there is no version of this search engine that was ever going to be usable from Ankara, and by 2017 I was thirty-three and had not gone looking for a new search engine in a decade.

The company behind it was Xilopix, founded in 2008 in Épinal, in the Vosges, by Éric Mathieu and Cyril March. They said in 2013 that the engine would be online by the end of that year with a million euros of revenue. It arrived four years after that date, on 9 May 2017, and the company had booked five thousand euros in five years.

What they were building was not a Google clone. Mathieu's argument was that Google and Baidu and Bing and Yandex all rank by popularity through some version of PageRank, which leaves the user sealed inside whatever the crowd already clicked. His example was that you could not easily discover Arsenal is not only a football club.

So Xaphir surfaced what it considered trustworthy links instead of popular ones, and it deliberately excluded Wikipedia from results. Whether that was right is a genuinely open question. Whether it was survivable, given eight years of runway and no revenue, was not.

~ the record ~

~ eight years of building ~

Eight years is an extraordinary amount of time to spend before launch on anything, and for a search engine it is close to fatal on its own. The web you started indexing in 2009 is not the web you ship against in 2017. Search moved to mobile, and to a scale of infrastructure that a Vosges startup was never going to buy.

The number that settles it is the index. After eight years Xaphir had 169 million pages. Qwant, a French competitor that had launched publicly in 2013, was at that moment claiming to index 1.5 billion pages a day. This was not a close race that ran out of money. It was a project that had never got within several orders of magnitude of the thing it was competing with.

~ six months of running ~

At launch the founders were still promising the world top five by 2020, on the strength of what they called the humanist qualities of the engine. Le Monde covered it that day as a French search engine setting off after Google, which is a headline France has printed for several products now.

Xilopix went into receivership with a stated cessation of payments dated 2 October 2017. On 10 November the Épinal commercial court validated the takeover by Qwant, and that is the day the search engine closed. Qwant completed the acquisition of the company and its products on the 16th, and kept a presence in Épinal afterwards. The liquidation was formally closed for insufficient assets on 12 February 2019, which is the sentence that means there was nothing left to pay anybody with.

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