Shamrock Search Engine
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| The Fourteenth Best Ireland-Based Search Engine Around | ||
| URL | http://www.ireland-information.com/engine/ | |
| Type of site | Search Engine | |
| Current status | Online | |
“It's quite shammy!”
Shamrock the Irish Search Engine, commonly known as SSE or Shammy Search, is a search engine dedicated entirely to all things Irish, which explains the annoying green theme of it all and the spinning clover leaf. Surprisingly enough, however, searching for "potatoes" and "red hair" gives you zero hits. And to top it off, searching "water" gives you a record seventeen results.
This terrible turn out of results caused an uproar from the non-Irish population of the world, who claimed such things as "It has results that are almost as bad as Yahoo's" and "Do they even know what food is? Eight results isn't encouraging". The Irish, in their defense, simply said "...us Irish don't search for that sort of stuff anyway".
The engine itself is ranked fourteenth among all Irish-Based search engines, out of fourteen total. The creators, though dismayed with their ranking, say "Eh, at least someone knows about us". Google recently considered purchasing the small company behind the engine, but realized that the people behind it all weren't really people, it was just a bunch of goats who heard about html once.
Advertising Campaign
Despite the controversy surrounding the engine and whether it should be removed from the internet, the creators made some nifty online and televised advertisements for the engine. Some of the more catchy ads included dancing beavers with painfully noticeable voice-overs singing the "Shammy Search Song":
- Search with Shamrock, the Irish Search Engine
- so yer back won't be a bendin'
- lookin' through an encyclopedia!
- So go ahead, search with ol' Shammy
- you'll be surprised, when you see it's so dandy!
All the while, the beavers were either swimming, chewing some trees, or mating; they did all of these without moving their mouths, making the commercial cheesier than its search results. The day after the commercial went on air, the website got two more hits than normal while YouTube exploded with several spoof videos.
Other advertisements include a Chinese man saying "It's quite Shammy!" several times in Mandarin Chinese, and an annoying ad that popped out in the middle of the Yahoo home page that takes forever to close.
Suspicions & Rumors
Many awful things are floating around about the engine, including death threats, rumors about a potential buyout, and just plain old jokes about how suckish it is. Most are levitated around the jokes about sucking, because nobody honestly cares if anyone buys it out or destroys it with hacks.
One of the more famous suspicions of the website is that it is really a porn site in disguise, and "Irish" is really just some style of sex. Several people have tried to crack the database to find the mysterious, rumored porn stashes, but no one has succeeded.