Let’s set the wayback machine for 1996, during which The Internet goes through its awkward adolescent age.

During the early years of the internet, 99.9% of all websites were hosted by universities and authored by the students of said universities. Domain names were handed out for free, but practically no one actually owned one. All urls looked like this: ‘www.nameofdepartment.university.edu/~student/subject/page.html’, and www.mcdonalds.com wouldn’t exist for several years yet (let alone be owned by McDonalds, but that’s another story.)

As nearly all the content was authored by university students, the subject making up the internet varied wildly. You could find information on Star Trek, Babylon 5, and pretty much any sci-fi* mythology. There were many pages about Bruce Campbell, Xena, The Simpsons and many other popular icons. Aside from the occasional page outlining technical UNIX/Linux/BeOS/etc information, you were pretty much stuck with Xena.

Around 1996 Altavista, the then internet search king, introduced a special ‘image search’ allowing users to search not only for page content, but actual images. I decided to use this opportunity to ascertain for myself just how useful this whole internet thing really was. I specially crafted a search query which I believed would push the limits of the idea that ‘you can find everything nowadays on the internet,’ an idea that was fairly popular with first time net searchers who find that the popular things they are trying to search for are in fact popular.

The query I designed to test the limits of Altavista’s image search was a simple one. The two words I paired quite effectively showed that you certainly could not ‘find everything.’ That search query was “Wilford Brimley.” There were 0 results.

For the next several years, I occasionally used my newfound internet-usefulness-meter to see how things were progressing. Not too long after Altavista released their image search, other search engines quickly jumped into the fray, upping the likelihood of an actual search result. Now it was a competition to see who would return the first Wilford Brimley search result. I can’t recall exactly when the first photo of Wilford Brimley showed up, but I do remember that it was Yahoo**, the then fanboy favorite upstart who had the first result. Finally, the internet had reached a level where anything you want to find could be found with a little searching.

If you do the same search today, you will find that the internet is far, far more useful than it was in the days of 1996. Wilfords can be found with mustaches, without mustaches, various levels of unclothedness, from movies, from television shows, from magazines, etc. In addition to the images, there are now hundreds of sites dedicated to the man, his work and the way of life he espouses.*** Things have certainly come a long way since 1996.

* At least one of my friends had a website dedicated to starship designs of the various different sci-fi worlds.
** Yahoo was regarded in 1996 almost exactly the same way that Google is today
*** “It’s the right thing to do, and the tasty way to do it.”