Back in the day I've had a website ranking in the top 3 of Google for "start using cgiproxy". Honestly, I never knew why people would search for such a complicated phrase, but I've found the keyword somewhere and optimized the website for it.

Do you mind telling me why where you searching for that phrase instead of something like "free proxy" or "cgi proxy"?

Free proxy and CGI proxy alone used to generate lots of fake results. As "start using cgiproxy" is the title of a cgiproxy page you'd typically get less false positives.

Not if the filter system you were subjected to attempted to block any URL containing the substring "proxy"... This led to as many false positives as you might expect.

In my era it was all about war dialing and AOHell.

You could also throw the tor browser on a usb stick when i graduated.

Tor doesn't work everywhere. I'd don't know how they did it but it was blocked in my school's computer lab.

Probably just blocked the port.