xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

Google is a popular search engine.^{[citation needed]} Google's searching algorithms are widely regarded as the most accurate and useful. If your search terms were sufficiently detailed, you will be able to find what you were looking for on the first page. Having to view the second page indicates your search terms were too vague or the answer to your query doesn't exist. When the search results typically number in the tens of millions (or more; in fact, more popular search results are in the billions), only the very first results are mapping to the real idea of the user. The second page is not helpful for the issue.

Cueball, after failing to find his query in the first page of results, takes a curious peek at the second page. This is represented by a not-at-all subtle metaphor in which Cueball is about to wander into a sun-baked desert. According to the title text, he finds one vaguely relevant webpage, but the copyright starting with '19', i.e from the 1990s or older, means that it's likely too old to be of any use.

The title text refers to webrings. Webrings consist of multiple websites that are connected together, usually with a common theme. They connect from one website to the next, eventually leading back to the starting site. They were popular in the 1990s as a way of boosting your search ranking, but newer algorithms in Google and other search engines are now detecting and penalizing web sites for such tactics.^{[actual citation needed]} Webrings were also used in pre-Google days to make it easy to find websites sharing a common theme, but since one site going down broke the ring, they were very inefficient. Seeing a webring typically means a site has not been updated since the mid 90s, though there are some people trying to bring them back for nostalgia reasons.