YossarianLives

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

~ the goodbye ~

The name comes from Catch-22, where Yossarian is the one man in the squadron who keeps insisting that the logic everyone else accepts is insane. That is an unusual thing to call a search company, and it tells you what Daniel Foster-Smith and J. Paul Neeley thought they were arguing against. Their claim was that keyword search had quietly become a machine for handing you back your own assumptions, better phrased.

The engine they built went the other way. You typed a query and it answered with images that were linked to it metaphorically rather than literally, so the results were recognizably about your subject while being obviously not the thing you searched for. A control they called Resonance let you push the results closer to or further from where you started. The pitch was that creative work needs the sideways association more than it needs the correct answer, and that no existing search product would ever give you one on purpose.

It came out of the Royal College of Art in London, which shows. The prizes arrived before the product did. A Deutsche Bank Award came in June 2011, and that November a place in Wave IV at InnovationRCA on money from James Dyson and NESTA. The Thinking Digital Start-Up Competition followed in May 2012, and the alpha went up that December.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a metaphor engine actually returned ~

The demo worked in the way art school demos work. Type in something concrete and you would get back a grid of pictures that were clearly responding to you, just not answering you, and for about four minutes that is delightful. The problem shows up on minute five, when you notice you cannot tell a good result from a broken one. Keyword search has a ground truth, since the page either contains the phrase or it does not. Metaphor has taste, and taste does not fit in a relevance score.

That is also why the filter bubble framing, which was the fashionable problem of 2012, did not save it. Nobody has ever paid for a tool that makes their answers less certain, whatever they say about echo chambers in public.

~ the rebrand, then the silence ~

The company did not sit still while the alpha aged. By the end of 2015 the work had moved to yossarian.co under the shorter name, and the copy had been rewritten for the market that actually existed. Yossarian is AI for creativity, the page said, search with a twist, loose associations to your query to help you be more creative. Same engine, same argument, with the art school framing sanded off and the phrase artificial intelligence moved to the front. In May 2019 the old address was still serving that version of the page.

Then nothing. No acquisition, no farewell note. By 10 August 2019 yossarianlives.com was returning a 403, and the last capture of yossarian.co anywhere is 17 November 2019. Neither domain answers today. Wikipedia records the whole ending in five words: as of 2019, it went offline.

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