"If only there was some kind of..."

Besides Why, in my day..., the other Slashdot meme from yesteryear that never failed to amuse is "If only there was|were some kind of..."

However, Google, Kagi, and even Slashdot's own site search were all coming up empty. To satisfy nostalgia, cobbled together these stylized versions with Claude Opus 4.6:

• If only there were some kind of enormous, interconnected network of computers, perhaps spanning the entire globe, upon which someone had built a system for indexing and retrieving information using simple keyword queries. Alas, we can but dream.

• What we really need is some sort of "engine" if you will, specifically designed for "searching". We could type words into a box and it would locate relevant documents from across the world's collected knowledge in mere fractions of a second.

These were the platonic ideal of what memory served up, but the desire for pure, unadulterated, human-crafted snark remained. Went in search of a Slashdot archive and hit paydirt with Sketch the Cow's Slashdot Story Archive (HTML Format), which spans 1998 to 2019. Spelunked like so:

% du -sh stories.7z | awk '{print $1}'
8.6G
% time ugrep -z -E "if only there (was|were) some kind" stories.7z > results.txt
...6:35.92 total

Two gems from the diggings:

• Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12, 2007:

  "[I]f only there was some kind of searching engine one could use, or some kind of encyclopedia in the form of a wiki where one could look up this information... Maybe some day."

• gosand on Monday October 06, 2003:

  "[I]f only there was some kind of searchable, massive collection of computers that were all hooked together somehow, and contained this kind of information."

❧ 2026-08-01