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(or, The Diary of a Confessed Caffeine Abuser)
Death of A Search Service
Community Found Too Late?
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
It was very sad.
For several years, I have been a happy and loyal subscriber to Inquisit.com (once known as Farcast), a service that ran "intelligent agents" for you*. It could search news headlines, press releases, newspapers, and other sources of information based on criteria that you could easily specify.
Even in 1999, where free search engines are everywhere you look, Inquisit's power was that it could be accessed anywhere easily, by email or the Web...they'd page you if necessary...and that it didn't blindly deliver garbage based on dumb string matches, but good, solid information.
Late Friday night, I received an email message with the subject "Final Inquisit Agent Reporting In". Signed by Chairman Jim Opfer and CEO Ralph Clark, it explained that, simply, the company had not remained viable and they'd be shutting down. Less than an hour later, I was a virtual eyewitness to one of the saddest sights you can see on the Web...someone was removing all the files, and by going from link to link and refreshing the screen, I was there for the final moment of www.inquisit.com when their home page finally disappeared. It was just like when I was six years old, sitting in the living room late at night by myself, turning off the television set and watching the picture shrink down in size to a small dot and finally disappear: electronic death.
I drank a toast to them then, at 1:44 AM on Saturday morning, June 5, 1999.
But Wait, There's More
I couldn't just leave you with that! I called Jim Opfer and told him I had really depended on Inquisit, and he forwarded me a 32 KB collection of emails from other loyal subscribers all over the world who had also loved Inquisit (and who also had been with them since the Farcast days). I recognized a few names, including Donna Dubinsky, Simon Trask, and Harry Rogers. But what really struck me was that virtually everyone said they would have been happy to pay double or triple the rates if it would keep Inquisit going.
Hopefully, some white knight will emerge at the last minute and save the company, or the technology, or the community. But perhaps saddest of all is that Inquisit didn't know how much people cared until it was too late.
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com, and his opinions are definitely his own.
* I preferred their original term "droids", but I understand that Lucasfilm stopped them from using that.
Last modified: Tue Jul 13 07:36:33 EDT 1999
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