Results Come Fast and Few at New Breed of Vertical Search Engines
By SatireWire.com - posted July 13, 2000

Conventional search engines can return millions of results. These new super vertical search engines help you narrow your search query by narrowing it for you. What is a manageable number of results? How about zero?

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SEATTLE, WASH. (SatireWire.com) — Despite numerous refinements, most search engines still return too many results, but now a handful of new, highly vertical search sites promises to revolutionize the market by returning the smallest number of results possible in the least amount of time.

Unprecedented speed and relevancy

Known as "vearch" engines, these new players provide unprecedented speed and relevancy by cataloging a narrow selection of sites.

At SearchFormerJehovahsWitnessSites.com, for instance, users can search for any keywords they want, but only on sites belonging to former Jehovah's Witnesses. Meanwhile, at LemonadeNEARBustier.com, visitors are restricted to a search of the Web for the specific Boolean phrase, "lemonade NEAR bustier." Slightly more inclusive is the popular RecreationalGoiterSeek.com, which brings back results from pages that already contain both the words "recreational" and "goiter."

A totally manageable search result

"Originally, we were going to separate it and provide results from sites that mentioned either recreational or goiter, but that brought back something like 950,000 documents," explained RecreationalGoiterSeek.com president Samantha Basset. "When we limited it to recreational and goiter, we got 35 documents. That," she added, "is what I call a totally manageable search result."

And manageable results, these sites claim, is why they will steal traffic from the Googles and Alta Vistas of the Web. Ironically, it's the advice espoused by these larger sites that the little guys are using in the battle.

Narrow your search

"What the big engines always say is, if you get too many results, narrow your search," said Johnson Avram, marketing director at GiggleWombatFrappeFind.com. "Our belief is, why force the user to do it when we can do the narrowing for them?"

But while GiggleWombat is pushing relevancy, other vearch engines are touting sheer speed. In this race, the winner is LikeSixteenNakedButterfliesMatriculating-Search.com, whose database indexes only those pages that include the exact phrase "like sixteen naked butterflies matriculating."

Google is lethargic

How fast is the site? In a test, a search for the words "oh, a bagel," returned no documents, but took exactly 0.0 seconds. By contrast, that same hunt at Google resulted in an unwieldy 4,479 documents returned in a lethargic 0.66 seconds. Why the dramatic difference?

"There are really two keys for us," said Davis Kobe, the Chief Executive Officer of LikeSixteenNakedButterfliesMatriculating-Search.com. "One is our proprietary search technology, which is able to respond to any search, whether for an exact phrase or string of words, in exactly 0.0 seconds. The reason for this, and our second key, is that there are no sites that contain the phrase 'like sixteen naked butterflies matriculating.' Therefore, unlike the major sites, which index maybe 300 million documents, we index exactly no documents. None. This guarantees that our users will get both an accurate and instantaneous response."

Editor's Note: As this story went to press, Davis Kobe and the co-founders of LikeSixteenNakedButterfliesMatriculating-Search.com realized that when the story was published, there would now be another site where the phrase "Like sixteen naked butterflies matriculating" could be found. As this would force them to index this site, and thereby slow down their trademark 0.0 searches, Kobe sent us a note stating the site has been officially renamed, and can now be found at the following URL: LikeSixteenNakedButterfliesMatriculatingHooverDamGreetingsStarchMonkey-Search.com.

Editor's Note to Editor's Note: Not long after sending us the previous note, the owners of LikeSixteenNakedButterfliesMatriculatingHooverDamGreetingsStarchMonkey-Search.com suddenly realized that if we printed the new name, that name would also, ipso facto, be rendered useless. Therefore, the owners announced they have changed the site again, and in the interest of protecting their business model, they are now refusing to divulge what the name is or where the new site can be found.