When you read this you probably wonder what this “Unhappiness Search Engine” is. Well, it is a search engine powered by Google, but focused only on a certain set of websites. At the time of writing this (search engine started in June 2007), the search engine looks for your search terms in 81 hand-selected websites.
This site used to be the home of a blog of a rather shy IT-guy. The blog was started in March 2003 and until a few years later, all of its content was available to whoever went to look for it. With time, masses of posts and experience, sadly, came problems – like ex-girlfriends – and making everything that dude wrote available to the world didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore; so he put it all away and spent a lot of time making sure the content would never ever see the light of day again (aka removing it from Google, archive.org, etc.).
He still blogs, not as often as then, but he does. From afar he watches what people who used to link to his site nowadays do, and sometimes he wonders what it all would feel like, glitzering in the limelight.
Back in 2003-2005 this site used to be a really nice place to read sad and honest posts of twenty-something college student – it even got a webby nomination (or something like that) if the author recalls correctly – but then suddenly came privacy issues and the big question if it was “OK” to write about how you really feel when the ex-girlfriend, your best friend, friends and family can read what you are really thinking about them the very next day.