Canopy's founders, all designers, trawl through thousands of entries a day to highlight exceptional products.
From the initial entries, a longlist of 40 will be chosen and featured on the Guardian website.
But with so many entries, a general brand search, such as "Toshiba laptop," will bring back too many results.
The event attracted around 150 pasty entries, a similar figure to last year, which was the highest to that point.
With room for only one or two entries a person, almost everyone gets the benefit of the doubt, critically speaking.
Anger and melancholy at how the modern world had turned out gave some of the entries a charge.
Of the 650 entries a paltry 15 remain in business today, even if the interiors of some have been remodelled.
The service has about 8,000 users and receives 6,000 to 8,000 entries a month.
"When you're dealing with an electronic system that is handling one million-plus entries a year," he added, "it shouldn't be held together by twine and baling wire".
With 59 entries presented in alphabetical order (some letters have several entries, a few have none), he goes from Audubon, Eastwood and Greyhound to Monroe, Presidents and Vikings.
That's the challenge the bestselling Scottish crime writer has taken on with Dark Entries, a graphic novel published this week by DC Comics's Vertigo imprint.
