The moment Google announced it was letting users download their entire search histories, I clicked — and downloaded a cache of 128,948 searches, the sum total of my last 12 years, five months, one week and three days online. I fully expected to be reminded of those repeated requests for ‘‘Finnish gymnastics’’ and ‘‘comorbidity of insomnia and brain lesioning,’’ but what surprised me was how regularly I searched for other search engines: ‘‘alternative search engines,’’ ‘‘alt search engines,’’ ‘‘search engines that aren’t Google,’’ ‘‘search engines better than Google.’’

That’s how I first found my way to Mystery Google, a site that within a year of its introduction in 2009 rebranded itself as Mystery Seeker, the name under which it still operates. The site, in any iteration, has always been an enigma. It’s not clear who founded it, or who runs it, or whether it changed its name because Google threatened legal action or just acquired the domain. By contrast, what the site does is remarkably transparent. You type what you please and click Search; what you get in return are the results for the last query given to the site.

For example, just now I typed “Who runs Mystery Seeker?” and received results for ‘‘lesbian kittens’’ — apparently the request of the user just before me. The site is an exercise in collective perversion, an antisocial yet communitarian prank. You have to give before you receive, so while I began every session trying to baffle the subsequent seeker, I always ended up off-site, having been outclassed by a stranger: pages on Lincoln-assassination conspiracy theories, Nazi time travel, Mesoamerican apocalypse prophecies and, inevitably, pornography.