Wow, lots happened today.
Anyway, I amble over to my roommate Rob's [1] room to ask him something and see he's using GeoFind, [2] a meta search engine I had worked on. We had the following exchange:
**ROB:**
Oh good, [GeoFind]'s working.
**ME:**
Why are you using [GeoFind]?
**ROB:**
Why not? I always use it for my searches as it usually finds what I'm looking for. Why? Don't you use it?
**ME:**
No, I use Google. [3]
**BOTH:**
[Both start laughing at the situation]
I suppose it's a bad sign when even I don't use something I wrote anymore, but that's because there's no real insentive for me to work on GeoFind. I don't own the code (so I can't release it) and the company that currently owns it isn't doing anything with it right now and the search engines have changed how they work (for the most part) so it pretty much fell into disuse.
Besides, when I first started writing [4] the program there weren't that many metasearch engines around (this was in 1996) but now … there are dozens if not hundreds.
They're not hard to write.
[1] http://www.tragic-smurfs.com/
[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html