No, I’m actually not talking about Bing. Million Short is a search engine that provides you with less-than-revelant results on purpose as a kind of experiment in web trawling. If you want to find something old, obscure, or weird on the Internet, search engines like Google — or even Yahoo! — aren’t going to cut it. They’ll get you to what most people want, but maybe that’s not what you want. If so, Million Short has got your back; they slice out the top one million most indexed sites and let you dive right into the weird stuff.
The results can be pretty fascinating. If you give “Geekosystem” a search, for example, instead of finding our wealth of in-depth, yet hilariously tongue-in-cheek and frankly transcendent content, you’ll find links to an old collaborative art project called “A Geekosystem,” which itself links back to an expired domain. The top result for a query of “Google” is Google.au, and searching for “Twitter” will land you on Tweeternet.com, a little curiosity that’s loudly extolling the virtues of Twitter to no one in particular.
For all of you narcissists out there, Million Short is a great way to “Google yourself” while filtering out all the social networking noise and boring results you’re already aware of. Not like I’ve been doing that for the past 15 minutes or anything, I’m just assuming that would be a thing someone could theoretically do. Yep.
It’s definitely not something you’d want to use as your primary search engine, but it’s worth a look. The Internet is a massive and interesting place, but you rarely see anything other than the tip of the iceberg. Million Short provides a great opportunity to really dive in. Not everything down there is amusing, but some of it is. I highly recommend you take a brief excursion.
(via reddit)
- Google’s autocomplete feature has been stirring up trouble lately
- Google nuked one of its own page’s PageRanks not too long ago
- Of course, Million Short doesn’t have cool Easter eggs like this
Published: May 1, 2012 12:30 pm