Well I hammered some older DL sites and hardware sites that are not highly SEOed for modern googling, but nada. Wasn't even managing to "bracket" the range really. Seems like they're of an age where they get lost in what I'm calling "The great interweb discontinuity" which wasn't really a single thing, but a transitional period from approx '99 to 2002 where all the forums and blogs were transitioning from old perl/.cgi lashups and converging to Web 2.0ishness. Also server space was a bit whack-a-mole, up and down and boom and bust through the rocky dot-com crash era. Sites that had been around since '95 on Ma and Pa's Webservers inc at local ISP, found they had basically been sold to a wild and wacky "Borg all the webspace" startup throwing cash around like they got it off some dumbass for free, and then 3 months later when of course the cash had been burned up, **gone** data blackhole with all your websites stuff sucked into it... "But my contract said you did weekly backups" ... Bankruptcy Admin: "Yeah well there was some tape media and other junk, it went for like $20 at the auction."
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.