The history of Alleba

2001: an apartment on 6th Avenue

Alleba began in July 2001, in an apartment on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. I had a brand-new Dell Inspiron laptop — the peak of technology at the time — and an idea that Filipino websites deserved a place of their own on the web. I built a barebones directory and named it after my mother’s maiden name, Abella, spelled backwards. It is pronounced a-‘yeh-bah.

Abella is my middle name. In the Philippines, children carry their mother’s surname as their middle name, so the site has always been named after family — twenty-five cousins spread between Davao, Manila, Toronto and Chicago.

What it grew into

For years the directory did what it set out to do. Filipino-made sites got found by people who would never have stumbled on them otherwise, and small unknown pages had a better chance of being crawled by the larger search engines simply by being listed. Alleba was designated as The WWW Virtual Library of the Philippines, which is a designation it still holds today.

People rarely called it a directory. It was cited in articles, papers and link pages simply as the Filipino search engine, and that is still what it does: search is the core of Alleba.

There was a blog too, and a politics site, and message boards — the whole shape of what a personal web project looked like in the 2000s. Most of that has been retired. The archive of the blog is kept here, posts and comments intact, because it is a record of a period of the Philippine web that would otherwise be gone.

The quiet years

Alleba was a passion project. I ran it alongside everything else, with help from a few cousins, and eventually life took most of the time it needed. The site stayed online but stopped growing. I never let go of the domain or the directory, partly out of stubbornness and partly because twenty years of links is not something you throw away.

What it is now

I am reviving Alleba as a marketplace for small Filipino businesses. Not a megastore — a place where someone selling handmade keychains, running a small print shop, or organising a weekend workshop can set up properly, take orders, get paid through the GCash or bank QR they already use, and be found.

The web directory stays, and is still maintained. The old links still work. The rest is new.

Someone once asked me what my dream was. This is it: to help small Philippine businesses do well, using the thing I started in a New York apartment a quarter of a century ago.

Who runs it

My name is Andrew dela Serna. I studied at Ateneo de Manila University and at Pratt Institute in New York, and I have spent my working life in digital and multimedia work. I have served as an editor for the Open Directory Project and for the World Wide Web Virtual Library.