The Search For The Blank Query · 10:36pm Dec 4th, 2014
Skywriter discovered that searching for nothing returns his story, Home Is Where The Heart Is, as the first result. I hypothesized that this is because it's the highest rated story on fimfic that has no tags whatsoever. I then wrote a completely ridiculous story about this for some reason:
The great library of FimFiction stands tall in a great glass dome, suspended in a small pocket dimension, kept far away from the trials and tribulations of reality. An alien star scape, filled with a trillion points of light that no mortal would ever lay eyes upon, is visible from all sides. It is dark and musty, filled with a silence that throbs with the sound of one's own heartbeat. The shelves never seem to really end, and instead turn in on themselves in strange ways, so that one can simply keep walking forever and never run out of stories to read.
Within this sanctuary of literature lived a small pony. He had a blue-gray mane, and a cutie mark of a spyglass atop eggshell-colored fur. He stood at a small receptionist desk, and waited for bits of paper to materialize in front of him. They were always interesting bits of english, almost poetic in their laconic illiteracy. trixie best horse boobs butt, read one such request. twilight silly filly books BBBFF hugs [twilight tag] Word Count:5000+, read another. A surprisingly common one was clopfic, followed closely by futa.
His name was Search Bar, and he had a simple job. He would find stories that matched the words on the bits of paper, and return all the My Little Pony fanfics he could find that seemed like what they were looking for. He thought he was pretty good at his job. Some of the other search ponies kept making fun of him because he couldn't suggest spelling corrections, but he paid them no mind. They couldn't search for all fics of a certain word count that had Trixie in them. They couldn't search for gay vore watersports incest foalcon rumble thunderlane [thunderlane tag] [rumble tag] [rainbow dash tag] Word Count: 2000+.
He didn't actually know what any of those words meant, but he knew how to find stories that had those words in them! He even sorted the stories by rating, to ensure his customers got the best quality story they were looking for. He didn't know what constituted a high quality gay vore watersports incest foalcon story, but that wasn't his job. His job was to find it, and he did that very well.
Search Bar enjoyed his job. There weren't many other ponies in the library, other than Knighty and Xaquseq. They weren't very talkative unless they were fussing over the instructions he was supposed to follow when searching through stories. Even then, they usually just chucked a large rulebook at his head and left without another word. He was close friends with a pony called Feature Box, who seemed awfully stressed out all the time. His job was to pick new stories that were highly rated based on an algorithm that kept changing all the time.
Search Bar was glad that wasn't his job. His job was easy. Take a bunch of words, and find a fic with those words in it. Or sometimes, they wouldn't search for any words, and they'd just give him a list of tags, and he'd find all the stories with those characters in it.
Until one day, when everything fell apart.
Search Bar had just finished finding all the stories for season 1 orgy episode 1 old [Mane6 tag] [Order by: Date (descending)] when another search query materialized on his desk. Search Bar dropped his results into the Out bin, and looked over at his new task.
He frowned. He turned the paper over. Then he turned the paper over again. Then he turned it over again. His eyes went wide, and he began to hyperventilate.
It was blank.
Someone had searched for literally nothing. No tags, no words, nothing! What was he supposed to do?! The rules didn't cover this! Panicing, Search Bar fumbled around his desk, looking for the keys to the drawer that held his rulebook, only to accidentally knock them over the other side of the desk. He let out a high pitched cry before clamping a hoof over his muzzle and looking around in terror. Meeester was giving him a strange look, and Xaquseq seemed slightly concerned. Knighty was too busy being drunk to notice.
Search Bar sat back on his rump and tried to calm himself. He couldn't do his job while experiencing a nervous breakdown, and that wouldn't set a very good standard for the other patrons, anyway. He slowly felt his breathing slow, and finally trotted around the side of the desk, picked up the keys in his mouth, and got the bottom drawer open.
The rulebook was bound in tight, green leather, and its title was spelled out in golden raised lettering: search($tags, $character, $order, $publish, $status, $wordmin, $wordmax) { /* TODO */ }. His breath caught in his throat as he handled the sacred volume, carefully placing it on the desk and opening the cover. He flipped through the crisp pages, slowly and methodically, searching for an answer.
The closer he got to the end, the more frantic he became, until he finally slammed the rulebook shut with a thwack that reverberated through the endless rows of musty tomes. "It's not there," he mumbled, before falling back down on his rump. "It's not there!"
His cry of despair echoed through the sanctuary of literature, and he slumped to the floor, defeated. He couldn't do his job.
He couldn't satisfy the query.
Suddenly, his eyes lit up. There was already a rule about what to do if only tags instead of text were specified. Were there any stories with NO tags? What if he just got all the stories that had as few tags as possible? Scrambling to his feet, he galloped down endless rows of books, until he spotted two glowing stories nestled among the others.
Of the 233445 stories in the website, these were the only two stories with no tags. "Home Is Where The Heart Is" had the most upvotes, so it was first to be thrown into the bin. But two results weren't enough. Could he do more? What about stories with only one tag? There were plenty of those! He rushed around, and dug up the highest rated stories that had only a single character tag, and threw them into the bin too. It glowed, and his search result was sent out to the masses. Search Bar breathed a sigh of relief.
Crisis averted.
As fate would have it, there weren't any other searches for quite some time. Curious, Search Bar picked up the story he had found with no character tags. It was by Skywriter, one of his favorite authors. With nothing better to do, he opened the small book, and began to read...
9/10 "Inspirational" - IGN
Make sure Skywriter sees this.
You really need to make a drabble collection for these. It's frustrating to not be able to reread it:P
2633999
A what collection?
That was beautiful. Too meta to publish, unfortunately, but that is the sole flaw.
Goddamn.
~Skeeter The Lurker
2634014 *Grins* Drabbles! Little short stories, ficlets, anything thats not quite a full story on its own kinda stuff. n_n Present Perfect has one for all his writeoff pieces.
I just did a site search for "Hello, Search Bar. How's your day going?"
I got no results.
2634061
But this is way too meta and violates all the site rules forever, which is why it was a blog post xD
I hope Search Bar likes my story!
lol
2634061
I'm not sure that's a word.
But it should be.
2634233
That's why you make sure the first story in your ficlets collection follows all the rules, and sneak this one in as chapter #3 or #4.
2634785
If I do that I get banned because I'm deliberately sidestepping the rules which is all kinds of bad.
I could just ask for permission to post it but they banned these kinds of stories for a reason.
2634790
Eh, I've got a few overly-meta stories in my collections. I doubt they'd ban you for a first offense, if they noticed.
2634797
I would prefer to use that leeway on a completely different story that is tiptoeing the "too meta" line like crazy and I actually do want that one to pass moderation. This one is straight up referencing "fimfiction" in blatant disregard of the rules.
2634801
Fair enough!
Great metastory. Thank you for it. And I hope Search Bar is a kind mentor to the new kid, Related Stories.
2634117
He's still thinking.