Ancient Web: The Saudi Network Kept GeoCities-Era Personal Links in a Business Directory
The Saudi Network mixes a commercial country directory with a surviving list of Saudi personal homepages hosted on GeoCities, Xoom, universities, and other vanished services.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
The Saudi Network looks at first like an old-fashioned business directory: banks, hotels, embassies, universities, hospitals, and shipping companies arranged beneath a large heading about Saudi Arabia. Tucked inside is something more revealing: a telephone book for personal homepages that no longer have telephones attached.
The gateway belongs to Nova Stars Information Services and links to a Saudi Arabia Directory, the 1001 Arabian World Directory, and other regional sites. It still advertises a Yahoo Groups mailing list for its business network and points toward a cyber mall. These are reminders of an era when a webmaster expected to gather every useful address in one place.
But the most valuable artifact may be its Saudi Personal Home Page Links, alphabetized from A to Z.
A roll call of people and vanished hosts
The directory lists pages by Abdulaziz Alhuwaimel, Abdullah Alqahtani, Mohammad Khorsheed, and many more. Short descriptions offer snapshots of what people wanted to share: academic research, student life overseas, Arabic links, travel, artwork, personal photographs, and even a Saudi IRC community.
The URLs tell their own story. They point to GeoCities, Xoom, Angelfire, Tripod, university machines in the United States and Britain, and an old ICQ homepage. Some destinations are now gone or have changed hands. The descriptions survive even where the linked pages do not.
A separate Saudi Arabia category directory uses a classic hierarchical arrangement: business, computing, education, government, news, religion, travel, and more. The design assumes that a visitor may browse by topic instead of entering a keyword into a universal search engine.
The present site has been maintained in places; the cookie banner and hotel-booking links are later additions. It does not supply a reliable founding date, so the personal homepage list, rather than a guessed launch year, is the basis for its historical value.
The directory is also a record of an international web that is easily overlooked in English-language histories. Saudi students, professionals, and hobbyists were making personal sites, trading descriptions, and finding one another through local indexes.
Explore the personal-page directory and the regional categories.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #Preservation, #ancientweb, #personalweb, #webdirectories, #saudiarabia