But the WTDSS backlash had begun as well. Barry Petchesky, a Deadspin writer, called Kanalley’s post “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” Gawker introduced a new phrasing in a piece titled—What Time Is the Superbowl?—then failed to answer its own question.

Yet all these news organizations’ attempts at temporal dominance failed. They were defeated, in fact, by the entity that made the Bowl Super in the first place. In 2012, the NFL posted a sparse page to its website titled “What time is Super Bowl 46?”. The NFL “won” the year, appearing at the top of Google’s results.

In 2013, fewer news organizations got into the WTDSS game. Petchesky, returning to the topic, found only “obscure” news organizations when he googled. He mused that WTDSS had become a “lost art.”

At Slate, meanwhile, technology writer Will Oremus offered a reason why. Oremus argued that Google itself had killed the WTDSS hustle. Search “what time does the superbowl start,” he said, and Google informs you of the answer without sending you to another site, just as it would inform you of the weather or the score of a game in progress. Siri does the same.

This year, Google got even more specific. Google killed the SEO journalism job. It killed WTDSS. Here's what people got if they searched "what time does the superbowl start":

Oremus’s post had primed me to expect a quiet year on the WTDSS front.

How wrong I was: Gawker has tracked WTDSS through time, and Alex Balk, a writer at The Awl, has already penned a poem.

“From a newsroom’s perspective, it was kind of a no brainer to do [SEO] as long as a newsroom had resources,” Kanalley said.

The SEO game, at least as far as Google Trends is concerned, has ended. But, in Kanalley’s view, too, the habits and ideas that informed—and were informed by—SEO wound up helping to define what social news looked like. In 2011, he said, HuffPo presented itself as the Internet’s newspaper. It wrote about what the Internet was talking about.

That’s still the goal of HuffPo’s Trends team, which has grown from two to 10 staff members since the WTDSSingularity. Dean Praetorius, whom Kanalley hired and who now oversees the team, told me that Trends still looked “for stories at the top of the Internet,” but that it does that by tracking social media more than it does search.

“The move towards social across our newsroom wasn’t driven by a decline in search or anything like that,” he wrote in an email. “It's simply that users have been picking up on social and that's where the conversation has been.”

And when the Trends team does create stories along the lines of WTDSS now, he said, its members do it trying to “give people what they are looking for and give them the best information possible.”

“The whole incident,” he said of WTDSS, taught HuffPo that when doing SEO, “you really, really have to take the extra care and do the diligence.”

The ecosystem around the Internet’s conversation has changed, too. Google Trends no longer serves the number of keywords it once did, and the keywords it does serve lack specificity. It also serves more answers than it did in 2011.