Speedy Pete The Forgotten Search Engine That Dared To Take On Google
Sunday, 16th November 2025
Back in March 2010, I built a spoof search engine called Speedy Pete's Internet Directory. It looked like something that had been abandoned on the web since about 1997, yet somehow still claimed it was here to take on Google. The idea was that people would soon stop saying "Google it" and instead proudly announce they were going to "speedy hyphen pete dot com it," because of course the domain was speedy-pete.com.
The homepage looked intentionally bad, like something dug out from the ruins of GeoCities. A blinking star-field background, low quality images, animated gifs, strange decorative borders, and an animated cowboy mascot for no discernible reason. Right at the top, there was a very proud claim that the site hosted "Over 450 websites in our ever growing directory!" as if that were genuinely impressive.
You could search by category - business, communications, entertainment, gardening, home, or a very vague "other" - and then enter your query. Clicking the 'Find It!' button took you to a results page where you were told to wait while your request was dealt with by one of the site's "highly-trained search agents," who were supposedly real humans sitting somewhere, manually looking up websites.
Of course, that wasn't true - it was part of the parody. But the site leaned into the idea completely, even playing hold music while you waited. Not just any music either. Tinny MIDI-style versions of OMC's 'How Bizarre' or Blur's 'Song 2.' The whole thing felt like calling dial-up tech support in 1998.
Eventually, after a short delay, the site returned a single URL. Just one. That was your result. The site claimed this happened "in under two minutes," although it did warn that "two minutes is the average response time during office hours, response time may be longer during busy periods."
Just to make the experience even more infuriating, the "search agents" only worked between 9am and 10pm. Outside those hours, the user was presented with a message that the directory was closed for the night and that they should try again tomorrow during office hours.
The whole site was full of deliberately nostalgic little gags - like the message warning that it was "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4.7 or better at 800x600." There were broken banner ads. And a notice claiming the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button had been removed due to a copyright claim from a rival internet directory.
Speedy Pete's Internet Directory started as a joke on Australian radio. In 2009, Hamish Blake told his co-host Andy Lee that he'd spotted someone in Tokyo wearing a T-shirt for a search engine called Speedy Pete's Internet Directory. The pair started imagining what the site must be, and it snowballed, becoming a running joke on the show that it was Google's biggest underdog rival.
Like every other fan of the show, I Googled it and discovered it didn't actually exist. So I fixed that problem. I registered the domain and built Speedy Pete's Internet Directory myself.
The funniest thing about Speedy Pete is that underneath its intentionally, horrendous look, it was surprisingly modern for the time, even though it looked like it was built using old-school HTML tables, inline styles and animated GIFs, but in reality it used HTML5 and CSS - the same building blocks we still use today. The background may have looked like a tiled GIF from someone's Angelfire fan page, but behind the scenes it was coded properly.
The search function was even better. The joke only worked if the site actually returned something, but building a real, working search engine would have been a bit of a pointless project - even for me. So instead I hooked Speedy Pete into Google behind the scenes. When you waited for Speedy Pete's "human search agents" to do their job, what was really happening was the site was automatically pulling in the top result from Google - but only after making you wait and listen to bad MIDI music. And yes, even that was fake. The music wasn't actually MIDI at all, it was a modern MP3 designed to sound like MIDI so it would work across every browser and device. All that effort just to make it worse.
Hamish and Andy's audience loved it. The site became a recurring part of their show's lore, and Speedy Pete took on a life of its own, growing into a strange, fictional tech underdog.
Speedy Pete ran for several years. I kept the joke going for as long as I could, but in 2017 Google finally discontinued the third-party access I was using to fetch results. Maybe they were threatened by Pete's rise after all. There weren't really any easy or free alternatives to switch to either, so Speedy Pete's era of internet domination ended.
I didn't keep any search stats or analytics from the time, which is a shame - I'd love to be able to look back on how many people actually used it over the years. But it doesn't matter. I know the joke landed and found its audience, and it did exactly what it was meant to. It made people laugh.
Well, that should have been the end of the story... but it's not. While writing this blog post, I wanted some screen grabs of the old site, so I dug out the original code and got it running on a server again. Of course, since the old version depended on Google's discontinued service, Speedy Pete didn't really work anymore. So getting the grabs was a bit of a struggle.
Then it hit me. I could use AI to bring Speedy Pete back to life. Instead of actually searching the internet, what if I created a custom AI model that could respond to a search by giving the user a single website? It would be a bit like ChatGPT, but with a standing order to always reply with the "best website" for the user - and to return one URL only, nothing else.
And it worked. Brilliantly. I successfully resurrected Speedy Pete's Internet Directory.
But things have changed since I first built the site in 2010. Back then, most people were browsing the internet on laptops or desktop monitors. Today, the vast majority of visitors are on their phones. And even though Speedy Pete is meant to look terrible, it still needs to be usable - otherwise the joke falls flat. So I rebuilt the layout completely, while staying totally loyal to the original look. On a laptop, it looks exactly the same. On mobile, everything's been adjusted - scaled, shuffled, and tidied - so you can actually use the site on a smaller screen. I like to think I've managed that without ruining its character. This means the site is now, as we say in the web business, "fully responsive" - it adapts to different screen sizes without breaking.
There was one other complication too - the hold music. Back in the day, getting a website to automatically play sounds wasn't an issue. Now it's practically forbidden, since users find sounds that autoplay annoying. Modern browsers block websites from playing audio unless the user has interacted first - which makes sense, because nobody wants to load a website and suddenly have OMC's 'How Bizarre' blasting from their phone in a quiet café. So I had to reconfigure things to make sure the browser understood that the hold music was triggered by user action - in this case, by performing a search. I considered adding a new track to the random selection, but decided against it. You can't improve on the classics.
In a weird way, I love the site even more now. The original version used 2010 standards to create something that looked like it belonged in 1998. This version uses modern AI to power a website that still pretends it's trapped somewhere between Windows 95 and Windows XP. To have a deliberately stupid spoof search site powered by an actual AI model is ridiculous and hilarious - it's everything Speedy Pete should be.
But once I got it running again, I wondered... what would Peter Speed - the founder of Speedy Pete's Internet Directory - make of today's AI boom, especially ChatGPT? He'd see it as an opportunity, obviously. He'd try to compete. He'd launch Chat G-Pete-T, a live chat bot of his own. So, I added that to the site too.
Now, you can chat in near real time with Speedy Pete himself and get any question answered.
Obviously, I couldn't just let the bot respond like a normal AI. I told it to act like a stressed-out lone worker, frantically trying to run a ChatGPT clone on their own. So the responses you get are short, rushed, sometimes vague, and often unhelpful - but thanks to the AI underneath, they're actually still relevant and based on an understanding of your question. Speedy Pete may sound like he's on the verge of a breakdown, but he's doing his best.
And the strangest thing is that sometimes his answers are better than ChatGPT's. If you ask a simple yes-or-no question, ChatGPT might give you a full essay on the subject. Speedy Pete doesn't have time for that. He just tells you what you need to know and moves on. In his own chaotic way, Pete's still ahead of his time.
One final scary thought. I first built Speedy Pete in 2010, which was already a nostalgic throwback to the late 90s. That means the gap between now and the original version of this site is actually longer than the gap between 2010 and the era of blinking text, animated gifs, and star-field backgrounds. The 90s already felt ancient in 2010, but weirdly 2010 doesn't feel that long ago. That's how old this joke has become.
The homepage looked intentionally bad, like something dug out from the ruins of GeoCities. A blinking star-field background, low quality images, animated gifs, strange decorative borders, and an animated cowboy mascot for no discernible reason. Right at the top, there was a very proud claim that the site hosted "Over 450 websites in our ever growing directory!" as if that were genuinely impressive.
You could search by category - business, communications, entertainment, gardening, home, or a very vague "other" - and then enter your query. Clicking the 'Find It!' button took you to a results page where you were told to wait while your request was dealt with by one of the site's "highly-trained search agents," who were supposedly real humans sitting somewhere, manually looking up websites.
Of course, that wasn't true - it was part of the parody. But the site leaned into the idea completely, even playing hold music while you waited. Not just any music either. Tinny MIDI-style versions of OMC's 'How Bizarre' or Blur's 'Song 2.' The whole thing felt like calling dial-up tech support in 1998.
Eventually, after a short delay, the site returned a single URL. Just one. That was your result. The site claimed this happened "in under two minutes," although it did warn that "two minutes is the average response time during office hours, response time may be longer during busy periods."
Just to make the experience even more infuriating, the "search agents" only worked between 9am and 10pm. Outside those hours, the user was presented with a message that the directory was closed for the night and that they should try again tomorrow during office hours.
The whole site was full of deliberately nostalgic little gags - like the message warning that it was "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4.7 or better at 800x600." There were broken banner ads. And a notice claiming the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button had been removed due to a copyright claim from a rival internet directory.
Where The Idea Came From
Speedy Pete's Internet Directory started as a joke on Australian radio. In 2009, Hamish Blake told his co-host Andy Lee that he'd spotted someone in Tokyo wearing a T-shirt for a search engine called Speedy Pete's Internet Directory. The pair started imagining what the site must be, and it snowballed, becoming a running joke on the show that it was Google's biggest underdog rival.
Like every other fan of the show, I Googled it and discovered it didn't actually exist. So I fixed that problem. I registered the domain and built Speedy Pete's Internet Directory myself.
The Tech Behind The Terrible Design
The funniest thing about Speedy Pete is that underneath its intentionally, horrendous look, it was surprisingly modern for the time, even though it looked like it was built using old-school HTML tables, inline styles and animated GIFs, but in reality it used HTML5 and CSS - the same building blocks we still use today. The background may have looked like a tiled GIF from someone's Angelfire fan page, but behind the scenes it was coded properly.
The search function was even better. The joke only worked if the site actually returned something, but building a real, working search engine would have been a bit of a pointless project - even for me. So instead I hooked Speedy Pete into Google behind the scenes. When you waited for Speedy Pete's "human search agents" to do their job, what was really happening was the site was automatically pulling in the top result from Google - but only after making you wait and listen to bad MIDI music. And yes, even that was fake. The music wasn't actually MIDI at all, it was a modern MP3 designed to sound like MIDI so it would work across every browser and device. All that effort just to make it worse.
Hamish and Andy's audience loved it. The site became a recurring part of their show's lore, and Speedy Pete took on a life of its own, growing into a strange, fictional tech underdog.
Goodbye Pete
Speedy Pete ran for several years. I kept the joke going for as long as I could, but in 2017 Google finally discontinued the third-party access I was using to fetch results. Maybe they were threatened by Pete's rise after all. There weren't really any easy or free alternatives to switch to either, so Speedy Pete's era of internet domination ended.
I didn't keep any search stats or analytics from the time, which is a shame - I'd love to be able to look back on how many people actually used it over the years. But it doesn't matter. I know the joke landed and found its audience, and it did exactly what it was meant to. It made people laugh.
Rebooting Pete In 2025
Well, that should have been the end of the story... but it's not. While writing this blog post, I wanted some screen grabs of the old site, so I dug out the original code and got it running on a server again. Of course, since the old version depended on Google's discontinued service, Speedy Pete didn't really work anymore. So getting the grabs was a bit of a struggle.
Then it hit me. I could use AI to bring Speedy Pete back to life. Instead of actually searching the internet, what if I created a custom AI model that could respond to a search by giving the user a single website? It would be a bit like ChatGPT, but with a standing order to always reply with the "best website" for the user - and to return one URL only, nothing else.
And it worked. Brilliantly. I successfully resurrected Speedy Pete's Internet Directory.
But things have changed since I first built the site in 2010. Back then, most people were browsing the internet on laptops or desktop monitors. Today, the vast majority of visitors are on their phones. And even though Speedy Pete is meant to look terrible, it still needs to be usable - otherwise the joke falls flat. So I rebuilt the layout completely, while staying totally loyal to the original look. On a laptop, it looks exactly the same. On mobile, everything's been adjusted - scaled, shuffled, and tidied - so you can actually use the site on a smaller screen. I like to think I've managed that without ruining its character. This means the site is now, as we say in the web business, "fully responsive" - it adapts to different screen sizes without breaking.
There was one other complication too - the hold music. Back in the day, getting a website to automatically play sounds wasn't an issue. Now it's practically forbidden, since users find sounds that autoplay annoying. Modern browsers block websites from playing audio unless the user has interacted first - which makes sense, because nobody wants to load a website and suddenly have OMC's 'How Bizarre' blasting from their phone in a quiet café. So I had to reconfigure things to make sure the browser understood that the hold music was triggered by user action - in this case, by performing a search. I considered adding a new track to the random selection, but decided against it. You can't improve on the classics.
Now With Added AI
In a weird way, I love the site even more now. The original version used 2010 standards to create something that looked like it belonged in 1998. This version uses modern AI to power a website that still pretends it's trapped somewhere between Windows 95 and Windows XP. To have a deliberately stupid spoof search site powered by an actual AI model is ridiculous and hilarious - it's everything Speedy Pete should be.
But once I got it running again, I wondered... what would Peter Speed - the founder of Speedy Pete's Internet Directory - make of today's AI boom, especially ChatGPT? He'd see it as an opportunity, obviously. He'd try to compete. He'd launch Chat G-Pete-T, a live chat bot of his own. So, I added that to the site too.
Now, you can chat in near real time with Speedy Pete himself and get any question answered.
Obviously, I couldn't just let the bot respond like a normal AI. I told it to act like a stressed-out lone worker, frantically trying to run a ChatGPT clone on their own. So the responses you get are short, rushed, sometimes vague, and often unhelpful - but thanks to the AI underneath, they're actually still relevant and based on an understanding of your question. Speedy Pete may sound like he's on the verge of a breakdown, but he's doing his best.
And the strangest thing is that sometimes his answers are better than ChatGPT's. If you ask a simple yes-or-no question, ChatGPT might give you a full essay on the subject. Speedy Pete doesn't have time for that. He just tells you what you need to know and moves on. In his own chaotic way, Pete's still ahead of his time.
One final scary thought. I first built Speedy Pete in 2010, which was already a nostalgic throwback to the late 90s. That means the gap between now and the original version of this site is actually longer than the gap between 2010 and the era of blinking text, animated gifs, and star-field backgrounds. The 90s already felt ancient in 2010, but weirdly 2010 doesn't feel that long ago. That's how old this joke has become.