Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Let's talk about anything related to the 6502 microprocessor.
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BigEd
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Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Post by BigEd »

Wiby is a search engine "for the classic web" which mostly returns simple textual websites. Here's an example, results for 6502, which includes some sites I haven't seen before:
https://wiby.me/?q=6502
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BigEd
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Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Post by BigEd »

Thinking about it, as and when people are building huge and ambitious computers here, and wondering about browsers, one of the obstacles is that the whole encryption thing is quite complex. So having access to an http-only web would be handy. But there's not a great deal of that - it's a pity wiby (linked above) only offers an https version. Likewise, textise.net is quite handy for turning modern sites into text, but it's https-only.

Here are a couple of sites I found - would be interested to hear of others, especially if there's an http-only search engine. Or a big curated directory, as we briefly had before search engines.
http://retro.hackaday.com/
http://textfiles.com/
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BigEd
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Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Post by BigEd »

Oh, here's a search site for vintage-computing purposes, which allows plain http access:
http://frogfind.com/?q=6502
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Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Post by BigEd »

Another candidate for unearthing old-school websites:
https://search.marginalia.nu/
Quote:
This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

The software for this search engine is all custom-built, and all crawling and indexing is done in-house. The project is open source. Feel free to poke about in the source code or contribute to the development!
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BigEd
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Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Post by BigEd »

Slightly drifting from the topic, here's an interesting kind of search engine which returns results from discussions - give it 10 or 15 seconds to construct its full response.
https://crew-rho.vercel.app/search?q=65 ... iplication
https://crew-rho.vercel.app/search?q=commodore+pet

And here's a search engine you have to sign up for - I think the idea is that they are motivated to produce the results you want rather than motivated to serve you adverts. They have a few demonstration searches, such as
https://kagi.com/search?q=python+exceptions
https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs
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electricdream
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Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites

Post by electricdream »

It's probably been mentioned before, but there are text-only browsers in the *nix world. Two that come to mind are lynx and links. Maybe neither of these are of any use for the aforementioned homebuilt projects, but might be worth investigating. I use links only occasionally but, it seems to render https sites pretty well.
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