Myriad Search

» see myriadsearch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Myriad Search went into beta on 16 September 2005 and Search Engine Watch wrote it up five days later. It was one person's work. Aaron Wall ran SEO Book, one of the louder voices in a trade that spent those years arguing with itself in public, and the tool was a side project sitting on his own domain. I came to it through its ending rather than its life, which with something this small is the usual route in.

What it did was query Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves at the same time and hand back the results with no advertising on them. That was the entire proposition, and in 2005 it was less obvious than it sounds. Result pages were filling up with paid placement, and the visual gap between a bought listing and an earned one narrowed every quarter. A metasearch front end was one of the few ways left to query four indexes at once without the advertising each of them carried.

In February 2006 Wall published the source code. That is unusual for a search front end and it meant the tool could outlive his interest in it, at least in principle. In practice it depended on the engines underneath continuing to answer, and Google eventually stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bias sliders ~

The interface survives in a capture dated 12 May 2008. You chose how many results you wanted, from ten up to fifty, and how many duplicates per engine you would tolerate, from none up to four. There was an optional box for your own Google API key. Then came a row for each of the four engines, every one carrying a bias control that ran from minus five through to plus five, with a switch that sat on Default until you pushed it to Exclude or Require.

The effect was that you could argue with your own search. An engine returning good answers for the kind of thing you looked up got promoted and stayed promoted; the one filling your page with noise got weighted down or thrown out of the query altogether. You could also step through the results one engine at a time instead of taking the blend. Modern search gives you none of these controls, and the footer on that page explained the whole position in one line: Myriad is an ad free meta search tool created by www.seobook.com.

~ a 301 that outlived everything ~

That 12 May 2008 capture is the last one showing the tool in working order. By 4 December 2008 a permanent redirect had taken its place, pointing at tools.seobook.com/authority-finder/, and it has not moved since. Wikipedia dates the withdrawal to 2009 and gives the reason as Google no longer working with it, with no citation attached to either; the archive has the redirect switched on before 2008 was out, so this grave files it under that year and leaves the encyclopedia's version in the record.

That redirect has now been running for nearly eighteen years, five times longer than the product it replaced. Ask myriadsearch.com for a search today and it hands you, without complaint, another of the same man's tools.

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