Modern Take • Wiby - A Search Engine for the Classic Web

I've just discovered a really cool and fun "search" option for two types of folks: people who have really old pre-https capable computers, and people who really want to find old websites for their content queries (ymmv). Apparently this site has been around for over four years but I've only just now found it.

Wiby is a search engine for older style pages, lightweight and based on a subject of interest. Building a web more reminiscent of the early internet.

Wiby:

In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

Additional Features:

• Web browsers without Mozilla 5 compatibility are not forced HTTPS.
• Developers can connect their applications to Wiby using the JSON output available at wiby.me/json.
• An http chat server compatible with ancient machines is occasionally online at wiby.me/chat.
  The source is also available for download at that link.

If you have a website that lacks data encryption, you can submit them to Wiby to be indexed. Ideally, even the use of CSS is discouraged. Think in terms of 1997 HTML 4 and you'll be in good shape. (I really miss that era of the web sometimes. Not the speeds, but the innocence and simplicity of it all.)

Amusingly, oftentimes only the page you submit will be "crawled". Now that's a good ol' bot right there stopping at the front door.

And the most joyful rabbit hole-inducing part of Wiby, beyond its 1.0 Web focus? A little "surprise me" link below the search bar. Google used to have a "I'm feeling lucky" button which would send you to the first result from your search - bypassing the search results entirely. Google actually used to lose a tiny bit of money by providing that button. It is now gone, of course.

The Surprise Me link, however, doesn't even need a search term. And when the site is loading, Wiby tells you in snarky plain text in the upper-left corner, "You asked for it!" It then serves a random page or site from its index.

I love it so much.

Here are some hilarious and/or fascinating results I got from using the randomizer:

• Eclecticism as a way of life
• Microsoft Word Sucks
• Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages
• The Skywalker Paradigm: A conversation about Star Wars
• Source and Contents of the oldest surviving HTML Files

Notes:
For the tech paranoid, you can hit https://wiby.me. However, if you want to hit Wiby on your old G3 Powerbook, you can go to http://wiby.me and it'll fire right up, too.

Also, if you're using the search bar for something very specific and topical, the results are... well, maybe not entirely useful. It seems you'll want to get creative about topics more than highly targeted proper nouns.

Statistics: Posted by intric8 — Wed Nov 20, 2024 9:01 am — Replies 0 — Views 90

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