Million Short bases its determinations of the top websites on Alexa rankings, and relies on a Bing API and some in-house information for its basic search capability, he says.

He notes, however, that the name should be taken with a grain of salt. Removing a million websites "was a little extreme, but I noticed that if you removed the top 1,000 or top 100 sites, you got some nice results." Still, "million" sounded better in a website name, he asserts.

Arora's also careful to point out that he's not critiquing the quality of the Web's giants by creating Million Short, merely in broadening the scope of search-based Web use.

One measurement of Million Short's success, according to Arora, is that it now frequently removes itself from relevant search results. He even uses the verb "m-shorting" to describe the use of the search engine.

So what's to stop a Google or a Bing from simply adding an "ignore x most popular sites" option to their own search pages? Nothing, really, according to Arora. On the other hand, such a move would be a powerful validation of the concept, and a boon to Internet users.