Invert Results to Million Tall
UPDATE January 30, 2013: Million Short Launches Voice-Search!

About Million Short

Million Short is an experimental web search engine (really, more of a discovery engine) that allows you to REMOVE the top million (or top 100k, 10k, 1k, 100) sites from the results set. We thought it might be somewhat interesting to see what we'd find if we just removed an entire slice of the web.


The thinking was the same popular sites (we're not saying popular equals irrelevant) show up again and again, Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason (poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, competitive keyword(s) etc.). Most people don't look beyond page 1 when doing a search and now they don't have to.


So far, feedback has ranged from: "This sux!" to "Great supplementary search" to "I think its a great idea!..When I do a search sometimes I try to look at the remote matches to see if there is anything interesting." to "i think this is cool too..viral???" to "Dude, this is a great SEO research tool" to "Removing the top million is a bit too broad, but removing the top 100,000 brings back some nice sites I probably would not have stumbled upon." to "This is a really good idea..long tail search! This would make a solid creeping/research tool" to "I actually love it".


  • UPDATE Dec 21, 2012: Launched Million Short DNS
  • UPDATE Sep 19, 2012: Million Short It On Challenge - www.millionshortiton.com
  • UPDATE Jul 4, 2012: We launched Million Tall - the inverse of Million Short.
  • UPDATE Jul 3, 2012: Million Short gets mobile and tablet update.
  • UPDATE Jul 3, 2012: News and Image search added - two of the most requested features.
  • UPDATE Jun 29, 2012: Million Short gets a facelift - a new design.
  • UPDATE Jun 15, 2012: Added search term highlighting (don't know why we didn't add this from day one)
  • UPDATE May 16, 2012: Million Short now supports 50 countries.
  • UPDATE May 7, 2012: Opensearch added. SiteBoost feature added.

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Million Short in the News

February 2013

Million Short featured on Saturday February 2nt, 2013 broadcasting of BBC News Click

Guide to the latest gadgets, websites, games and computer industry news.



November 2012

Overlord of the underweb

Imagine an online search for Facebook that omits all the results from Facebook.com. And from other major websites like Wikipedia, and instead the first few results it delivers are from sites offering free graphics for users' profile pages, a security and privacy guide, precautions for parents, or a collection of funny statuses.

Oct 2012

1,000,000 pages below: a search engine that plumbs the Web's depths

People look for diverse forms of information whether it's a mainstream alternative like Bing or an alternative like Million Short, one can understand that there's real interest.

May 2012

Million Short: A Search Engine for the Very Long Tail

Think of Million Short is not so much a search engine, but a discovery engine. Million Short's strength is not going to be answering the specific kind of queries that Google is forever optimizing its index to handle, but to discover less well-known sites and explore the more remote corners of the web that might be lost in other search indexes.

May 2012

Radio Interview with Founder Sanjay Arora on CBC Spark, by Nora Young

It's a search engine that delivers results to you, after it knocks off the top one million most popular websites. Your search won't turn up results with Facebook, YouTube, or Wikipedia. You can also customize it, so that it knocks, say, only the top 1,000 sites off, or you can configure the settings so that it lops off the most popular sites except Facebook, YouTube, etc.

May 2012

Million Short showcases the Web's supporting cast

Tired of all your search results coming from the same few sites? The tinkerers at Exponential Labs have you covered. Despite its almost unimaginable scope, the Internet can sometimes seem like a pretty small place these days. For some common types of search queries, top results tend to come from a relatively limited pool of websites -- the LinkedIns, Wikipedias and Amazons of the world.

May 2012

Try this search engine which does not return results from the top one million websites

How do you sort and rank the very best information? What if the information returned by two sites -- Google Places and Yelp, for example -- is nearly identical? Those decisions are judgment calls, coded into Google's algorithm by humans.

May 2012

Million Short removes popular search results to combat SEO

In this age of media conglomerates and search engine optimization, it can be hard to dig through for information from less well-placed sources. Million Short aims to fix that problem by removing a user-specified amount of top results from your searches in order to highlight sites you may not have seen before. .

May 2012

Making the Web wild again: New search engine ignores popular websites

Within a week of going live the site had logged 1 million visitors, and a month later Arora says it already ranks among the top 10,000 most-trafficked sites in the U.S.

May 2012

Ever wanted to find really random sites or articles, but when you search in Google all you get are results from the most popular websites? Meet Million Short

The search results were a little surprising. No Facebook, Google+, or other accounts that Google typically returns on searches for my name. These are the results that are typically buried on the deepest pages of search engines like Google and Bing.

May 2012

Experimental Search Engine Removes Top Million Sites From Your Results

Do you ever feel the search results that Google yields are too mainstream? Are you looking to explore the cavernous, cobweb-laden outer reaches of the interwebs? If you want to spend some time on some deep discovery, Million Short might be your ticket.

Aug 2012

There's Bing and Yahoo of course, but there are also some really cool meta search engines that are well worth exploring.

Don't limit your discovery to one engine. You can find some jewels if you look somewhere else, and that includes directories.