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Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites
Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2021 8:28 am
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
Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites
Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2021 8:37 pm
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/
Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites
Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 8:30 pm
by BigEd
Oh, here's a search site for vintage-computing purposes, which allows plain http access:
http://frogfind.com/?q=6502
Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites
Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2022 6:05 pm
by BigEd
Another candidate for unearthing old-school websites:
https://search.marginalia.nu/
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!
Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites
Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2022 8:35 pm
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
Re: Semi-OT: wiby.me a search engine for old-school websites
Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2022 11:32 pm
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.