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Million Short showcases the Web's supporting cast

29.05.2012
Despite its almost unimaginable scope, the Internet can sometimes seem like a pretty small place these days. For some common types of search queries, top results tend to come from a relatively limited pool of websites -- the LinkedIns, Wikipedias and Amazons of the world.

ELSEWHERE IN SEARCH:

But what if you could simply excise the top 10, 100, or even 1 million sites on the Web from your search results? Sanjay Arora, the founder of Web technology think tank Exponential Labs, was curious. He wrote the first version of Million Short in a single late-night session several weeks ago.

"It was just kind of something that popped into my head, and I did it," he says.

His colleagues, however, were not uniformly impressed by his creation. "Half of them loved it, half of them hated it," Arora recalls. However, after posting Million Short to the Hacker News website, "the rest is history."

"It's like a different Internet. It's the Web through a different lens," the creator says.