"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…