smallweb-search
Million Short
A search engine with a twist: it deliberately removes the most popular sites from the results so obscure pages can surface. You use its web search form directly, there is no API. Helpful for digging past the usual dominant domains when researching a topic. Currently degraded, and you may hit a CAPTCHA.
No programmatic check, opens the archive’s own search.
Why it’s useful & how it works
Million Short is designed as a discovery tool: it deliberately removes the most dominant websites from its results so that smaller, less-trafficked pages can surface. You choose how many top sites to strip away, from the top 100 up to the top one million, and the results shift accordingly. This makes it useful when a topic search is always overwhelmed by a handful of the same large domains. Echo links to the Million Short site where you search directly; currently degraded with a possible CAPTCHA.
What’s inside
Million Short draws on a broad web index and applies site-popularity filtering at query time rather than maintaining a separate curated index. The underlying corpus covers the general web; the distinctive value is the filtering layer, not a unique archive of content.
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Cloudflare challenge HTTP 403 92 ms (just a moment)
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Cloudflare challenge HTTP 403 650 ms (just a moment)
Reachability measured 2026-08-22.
Access
May require solving a captcha before it responds.