A while ago, I received an e-mail:
To: jonathan@rmit.edu.au
Date: Thu, 1 May 1997 11:58:24 +1000
Subject: search words
Priority: normal
Catch this:
The page contains an old list of the 200 most frequent search terms that people had used in the Yahoo! search engine. Most of the list contains sexual terms.
I was intrigued by "persian kitty" coming in at #15. It was below 'chat', netscape software', 'games' and 'weather' and above 'maps' (which goes with 'weather' in lots of people's searches, I guess).
'Got to be something suss here', I thought. 'There can't be that many Persian cat fanciers in the world. I'll bet it's another sex key word'. Given that the original list was from Yahoo!, I ran the search again.
I was right. Exactly right, as it turned out. Here is the result of my Yahoo! search.
Found 0 Category and 1 Site Matches for "persian kitty".
Business and Economy: Companies: Sex: Directories
[ Go to AltaVista ]
Now that's truly amazing! Who gets a unique match on Yahoo!? This has to be the most perfectly designed site in the world. It's the only site in Yahoo! that contains the string "persian kitty". Weird, but apparently true (unless there is something going on that I don't know about).
So how did they do it? Clever html, maybe? Or (just possibly) it really is a unique site? Just exactly how does Yahoo! work, anyway? I decided to find out.