Ancient Web: Piero Scaruffi Built a Knowledge Base Before Web Search Was Normal

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Piero Scaruffi has spent decades building the kind of website that makes a modern navigation designer reach nervously for a redesign proposal. Scaruffi would probably reject it.

Visit Piero Scaruffi's knowledge base.

Its homepage is a packed table of contents for music, cinema, art, science, history, politics, literature, philosophy, technology, and travel. Rather than corralling readers into a handful of featured stories, it offers directories that lead to other directories, then to vast lists of individual essays.

An internet publication older than its browser

Scaruffi's account of the site's history begins with an electronic magazine he distributed by email in the 1980s. That became an FTP-accessible database in the late 1980s, then a web site in 1995. He presents this as a continuity of personal publishing rather than a brand launch.

The oldest sections are particularly associated with his expansive histories and reviews of rock, jazz, avant-garde music, and cinema. He also maintains timelines of philosophy and scientific subjects, art reference materials, travel notes, and a history of Silicon Valley.

He is a critic with strongly expressed preferences, not an impersonal reference service. A reader should distinguish his arguments and ratings from settled consensus, especially in music criticism.

Fast text instead of slow polish

The site philosophy page is almost a manifesto against contemporary web habits. Scaruffi says he dislikes graphics that delay information, rejects automatically playing video, and avoids intrusive advertising. He even jokes that his only business plan is to avoid making money from the website.

The result is undeniably cluttered, but it is also direct. Pages are organized as arguments, indexes, and bibliographies rather than feed entries that require a social account to find.

Scaruffi links a 2006 New York Times profile with the memorable headline “The Greatest Web Site of All Time.” Such praise is not proof that every assertion on the site is correct. It does show that the project had become notable outside its own audience by that date.

What survives here is not a frozen 1995 design. It is an evolving personal encyclopedia still willing to act like the web is primarily for linking pages of knowledge.

Browse the homepage and read Scaruffi's explanation of its history and design.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.