A Search Community That Means Business

In early 1999, on a restless late-night browse, I stumble across a peculiar corner of the early web. The site is called HitsGalore.com, and their tagline catches my eye: “a search community that means business.”

Back then, giants like AltaVista and Excite rule the search engine roost. But HitsGalore carves a different path entirely: let users bid on keywords to climb their rankings. Selling baseballs? Pony up 10 cents to top “baseball.” Someone outbids you at 12 cents, you counter with 14—a “bid-and-rank” system, they call it.

I dip my toes in, tossing a few URLs into their mix—maybe WorldVillage links, maybe something else—and likely pocket a small cut through an affiliate tie to the bids. It’s a minor flirtation, a footnote in my sprawling digital experiments, yielding just enough to buy a coffee or two.

Then HitsGalore fades from my radar, overshadowed by the rise of DealofDay.com and the rest of my growing empire of early internet ventures. I don’t think about the site again for over a year.

I should have left it that way.

Dead Shares Come Alive

The dot-com bubble bursts in 2000. The market turns grim—profits shrink, optimism sours. I’m scraping by in Edmond, Oklahoma, with a wife and two young kids counting on me. To stretch the dollars, I dabble in penny stocks, a high-risk dance I’ll revisit decades later with crypto, always with the same knack for losing a buck or two.

I haunt message boards like Raging Bull under the name “WV Mayor”—a holdover from my WorldVillage days. Among my holdings: a handful of cheap shares in a dormant shell company, a public entity gone cold. Worth zilch.

Then lightning strikes.

HitsGalore pulls a reverse merger, buying that exact shell company to skip the IPO slog—a slick move to go public fast. I catch the news on Raging Bull: a press release trumpets the deal, helmed by a man named Damien Reed, the same outfit I’d toyed with in ’99.

My dead shares jolt awake, climbing from pennies to $10—even $20 at the peak. A modest stake morphs into a windfall, about ten-thousand dollars for me in a frenzied week or two. The boards erupt. Pumpers hype it shamelessly, touting HitsGalore as the next big thing.

I join the fray, posting with a mix of glee and credibility: “I know these guys—used their site back in ’99!”

It’s a rush. The kind of easy money that feels too good to last.

The Alarm Sounds

It doesn’t last. The buzz sours fast.

Whispers ripple through the message board threads—Damien Reed’s past is a minefield of flops, tinged with a multi-level marketing stench. Failed ventures where he’d allegedly cashed out, leaving investors holding the bag. Today, we’d call it a rug pull.

Doubt creeps in. I sense the peak, trust my gut, and sell—pocketing a tidy profit before the tide turns.

Then I pivot. Where others might quietly walk away, I sound the alarm:

I’m no crusader—just a guy who’d seen it firsthand, calling it straight on the boards. And I’m not alone. Janice Shell, a board legend like a pre-YouTube CoffeeZilla, leads a pack of skeptics, unearthing dirt that guts the hype.

The stock plummets. Investors watch their gains vanish—a brutal lesson in the pink sheets’ volatility. The SEC begins circling.

Twenty Million Dollars and Five John Does

HitsGalore strikes back with a weapon no message board skeptic expects: a lawsuit.

They file a $20 million dollar lawsuit—naming five “John Does” for allegedly destroying their company’s value with “trolls and lies.”

I open the filing and freeze.

WV Mayor’s listed. That’s me. Right beside Janice and the others.

My stomach drops. It’s the middle of the bear market—already squeezing me dry—and now this. A legal sledgehammer threatening my family’s stability. I’m pacing our Edmond living room, kids’ toys underfoot, imagining the worst: bankruptcy, losing everything.

The fear is visceral. Nightmares of courtrooms and emptied bank accounts. Easy come, easy go, sure—but this feels like a guillotine.

I hire a lawyer, bracing for a ruinous fight. He skims the filing for two hours and looks up:

I’m skeptical. But what choice do I have?

Diamond Hits and Empty Pockets

The ordeal stretches—months, maybe a year—of gut-churning limbo.

HitsGalore flounders, rebranding as “Diamond Hits” in a desperate pivot, but it’s a dud. They bleed cash. They can’t compete with real search engines. They ditch their own lawyers. And then, quietly, they collapse.

The case evaporates. Dismissed. Done.

I exhale for the first time in what feels like a year, gratitude flooding me like a lifeline.

Digging later, I discover HitsGalore had also sued Bloomberg for $500 million over a 2000 defamation piece—chronicled by the Wall Street Journal. That flopped too. Damien Reed’s empire crumbles completely, a fitting end for a shaky hustle that couldn’t outrun its own past.

Meanwhile, the SEC brings the hammer down. They charge the company and its president Stephen J. Bradford with securities fraud—a textbook pump-and-dump scheme using fraudulent press releases. The court orders over $2 million in disgorgement and penalties.

The skeptics on Raging Bull had been right all along.