Searching Like It’s 1999

Million Short is a search engine with a clever trick: it skips the top million results and takes you straight to the garbage.

Everything about the internet has gotten better. Sites work and look better, information is easier to find. It’s funnier! It’s smarter! Good job, everyone.

That said, I do miss the chaos of the old days. The filth and the mess, the hours of sorting through creatively awful Geocities pages. I miss looking for information on a historical event and only being able to find other students’ cross-sourced shitty book reports, imprinted in Comic Sans over an animated GIF background. That internet was basically useless, but it felt — and still feels — like home.

Million Short takes you back there. Not specifically to the past, though it’s pretty good at doing that too, but to the bottom. By whizzing you straight past the top million search results for any given term, Million Short reconnects us with the vast unsorted, unranked, unrefined and unappreciated content swamp on top of which the modern internet was built. Here are the kinds of “top” results you get:

3. “sports scores”

Source: thesportsscore.com

4. “tech news”

Source: worldtechnews.com

5. “cat pictures”

Source: pusscats.com

6. “corgis”

Source: awesomecorgis.com

7. “facebook”

Source: facebookloginhut.com

8. “health advice”

9. “plane tickets”

10. “barack obama”

Source: obama-zone.com

11. “mitt romney”

Source: whyromney.com

12. A vanity search for my own name

13. “porn”

Looks promising.

I think I may never stop using this. This is the internet where I belong.

Via: @lindseyweber