As a child of the '80s, I can divide my life cleanly into Before Google and After Google. Right around the turn of the millennium, the internet stopped being a tangled thicket of incomplete lists of weird stuff and became a useful research database. Ever since, Google Search has been one of the only technological constants of my adult life, persisting through the rise of smartphones, social media, streaming services, and even drone-based burrito delivery (also, what happened to that?). In all that time, nobody has been able to challenge Google's role as gatekeeper to the cornucopia of digital abundance. More than 90 percent of internet users around the world use Google to shop, navigate, and satisfy their curiosity about pretty much everything.

In 1992, Matt Moneymaker had an experience that would change his life. Some local farmers had told him about a number of mysterious sightings deep in the forests of Ohio. Without the internet or social media, Moneymaker did what you did back then: He placed classified ads in the hope that these witnesses might come forward and share their story and, crucially, the location where it had happened. "I went to the area where they had seen one, and I found tracks. And we heard their sounds, and I was at that point very, very, very committed to getting some video footage of these things" he told Engadget.