Pimp My Search

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

~ the last words ~

The product was one input box. You typed a word, Pimp My Search generated a page that looked like Google's homepage with your word where the logo went, and you got a URL to send to somebody. That was the whole thing. It started in 2006 and nothing much happened for two years.

Then 2008 arrived. Writeups and YouTube videos found it and the traffic followed, and the Internet Archive shows the page putting on weight while that happened: about 1.2 kilobytes in early 2007, two kilobytes by February 2008, three kilobytes by the end of that December.

In February 2009 the results stopped. The site posted a line saying that because of trademark issues Google was no longer allowing searches from it, and later swapped that for a flatter version saying that because of trademark issues Pimp My Search was closed for ever, with a link to a site called ShinySearch. The archive has the working page on 28 December 2008 and a 449-byte redirect on 4 February 2009. The domain does not answer at all now.

~ the record ~

~ why it worked ~

The joke needed no account and no explanation. You did not have to read English to understand a Google page with the wrong word on it, which is most of why it traveled as far as it did. In 2008 the way a thing traveled was a forum post with a link in it, and this was a link that was funny the moment it loaded.

It also sat in a category that has more or less stopped existing. A page whose entire function was to look like another page, on a domain you had never heard of, with no app and no signup behind it. The closest thing now is a meme generator inside a social app, where the output never leaves the app it was made in.

~ the sentence on the door ~

Most dead sites go quiet. This one left a sentence, and the sentence names the killer in one word: trademark. Google never had to take the site down. It only had to stop answering, because a lookalike page is worthless without live Google results behind the box. Cutting off the search was the entire enforcement action.

That happened a great deal in those years to things built on somebody else's service before anybody was calling it an API. Nobody got sued. The data just stopped arriving one week and the product was over.

~ the part nobody recorded ~

No one seems to have written down who made it. The Wikipedia article names no founder and no country, and the Internet Archive's replay of the old pages is blocked from where I am sitting, so I cannot read the site's own footer to check. For something that got mainstream pickup in 2008 that is a strange hole, and it is why this grave has no city in it.

I have no memory of using it, which is about right for the shape of the thing. A Google parody passes through a forum thread once and is gone by the following week, and by 2008 I was years past the age where I would have made one to stick in a signature. The mechanism is what holds up: a product that lived entirely at the mercy of a company which had never agreed to host it.

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