Resurrecting the first Dutch web index: NL-menu revisited
NL-menu was the first Dutch web index. The site was originally founded by a consortium of SURFnet, Dutch universities and the KB. From the mid-nineties onwards it was maintained solely by the KB. NL-menu was discontinued in 2004, after which the site was taken offline. In 2006 the domain name was sold to a private company that used it for hosting a web index that was partially based on the original NL-menu site.
Meanwile, the original NL-menu has been largely lost to the mists of time. Even though the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine contains rather a lot of snapshots of the site, these are incomplete, and don’t capture the original look and feel. For example, this page is a snapshot from June 2002:
However, this doesn’t look even remotely like the site as it was in 2002. Just for one thing, at the top-left we see a Bing search box, but Bing didn’t even exist until 2009! An inspection of the crawl time stamps (these can be seen by clicking on the top-right About this capture button) reveals that this “snapshot” is really an amalgam of elements that were crawled at wildly varying dates, some as recently as 2018:
NL-menu is not part of the KB Web Archive, as the KB only started its web archiving activities in 2007. The only remaining “complete” copies of NL-menu are three (recordable) CD-ROMs that were burned shortly before the site was taken offline in 2004.
