Back in the day, one of my first developer jobs was to build a "meta-search" system that issued queries and scraped results from something like a dozen differen

Back in the day, one of my first developer jobs was to build a "meta-search" system that issued queries and scraped results from something like a dozen different search engines - it supported pagination, direct links, annotations etc. all written in Perl. The 30 or 40 folks I supported found it insanely useful, and it ran on a spare decrepit laptop in a corner of my office with literal dozens of MB of RAM. This was maybe...2002? I sort of miss the days when there were different engines with different strengths and weaknesses and an endless set of matches for very literal queries. Users knew exactly why they got the responses they got from Altavista or whatever other engine and understood it was mostly a matter of what they indexed instead of a black-box of "optimizations" that give semi-random results most of which are spam sites. I miss the old days.