Our story

Hi. I'm Peter, and I built lmfify.com a few years ago because something I liked stopped working and nobody was going to fix it for me.

The thing that broke

If you were online in the 2010s you knew Let Me Google That For You. It was the perfect internet joke. Someone asks you a question they could have googled in four seconds, and instead of answering you send them a link. They click it, and a little mouse pointer glides across the screen, types their question into a search box for them, and clicks the button. No lecture, no sarcasm, just a small animated demonstration of how they could have done it themselves.

Then one day I went to use it and it wasn't right. I don't remember the exact state it was in — a domain thing, a redirect, some version that loaded but didn't do the fun part. What I do remember is the animation being gone. The pointer didn't move. And without the pointer moving, the whole thing is just a link to a search results page, which is not a joke, it's an errand.

I was mildly annoyed for about a week. Then I did the thing developers do when they're mildly annoyed for about a week.

So I built my own

From scratch. All of it. And I want to point out, with the smugness of someone who lived through it, that this was before any of us had AI writing code for us. No autocomplete that finished my thoughts, no chat window to paste a stack trace into. Just me, the docs, Stack Overflow, and a lot of hitting refresh.

The first version was PHP with a little SQLite database, because that was what I reached for at the time and it worked fine. The bit I actually cared about was the animation, and I remember spending far longer than was reasonable on it. Getting a pointer to slide across a page is easy. Getting it to feel right — the slight lag, the easing, the pause before it starts typing, the three seconds it waits on the button before fading out — that took ages. Those numbers are still in the code today. I've rewritten this site twice since and I've never touched them, because I got them right the first time and I know I'd only make it worse.

The bit that always annoyed me

Here's the thing I fixed while I was in there anyway. LMGTFY only ever did Google. That was in the name, so fair enough. But it stopped matching how anybody actually looks things up.

Think about the questions people send you. "Which one should I buy?" — that's a Reddit question, because you want humans who own the thing, not a page of affiliate listicles. "How do I get this panel off?" — that's YouTube, because you need to watch someone do it. "What's this error?" — Stack Overflow. "Where is it and is it open?" — Maps. Sending every single one of those to Google is technically an answer and practically a shrug.

So I called mine LMFIFY. Let Me Find It For You, not Let Me Google That For You, and the difference is the whole point. You choose where the question gets answered before you send the link. These days that includes ChatGPT, which arrives with the question already asked and sent, so your friend lands on an actual answer rather than an empty prompt box. Fifteen year old me would have found that extremely hard to believe.

Same joke. Same pointer. Just no longer pretending there's only one place worth looking.

What it's actually for

People assume this is a tool for being smug at people, and sometimes, sure, it is. But the version of it I like best is the one where it's genuinely kind.

My favourite messages about this site have been from people using it with a parent or a grandparent. Someone who isn't confident with computers gets a link, watches the pointer move to the box, watches the words appear, sees exactly where the button is, and the next time they just do it themselves. Nobody was made to feel stupid. Nobody had to sit through a phone call explaining what a search bar is. It taught them, and it was a bit silly, and both of those things at once is a nice trick for a webpage to pull off.

So yes, use it on your mate who asked what year a film came out. That's fun. But it works just as well as a friendly bit of teaching, and I think that's the better version.

Rebuilt, twice

The site you're on now is the third version. PHP and SQLite got replaced, and the current one is a fully static site — no server, no database, nothing to go down at three in the morning.

That change had one visible consequence worth explaining. The old version shortened your query into a little code, which meant every link depended on a database row still existing somewhere. Now the question travels inside the link itself. The links are longer, and I'm completely at peace with that, because they'll still work in ten years and you can read one before you click it. Given the state of shortened links on the internet, that feels like the right trade.

There was a certain irony in rebuilding a site I made because someone else's site stopped working. I did think about that while I was doing it. It's partly why it's static now — the fewer moving parts there are, the fewer things can quietly break while I'm not looking.

Still here

It's free, it has no accounts, and it isn't trying to grow into anything. It costs me almost nothing to run and it makes a few people laugh every day, which is a fine reason for a website to exist. There's a sponsor slot above the search box if you want to support it, and that's the entire business model.

If you found this because LMGTFY let you down too, there's a proper rundown of the differences. Otherwise, go and make a link. Someone will ask you something today.

Thanks for reading. Come say hello on @ThePeterMick if you use it for something good.