I miss the old web so much. It really was a magical place. It's so nice to see a search engine that doesn't interpret all my searches as if I want to buy something, or I'm looking for AI generated "best xyz in 2024" listicles.
After clicking on the surprise me button 20 times or so, a few things popped out to me.
1) I remember this time, we had delightfully nerdy hobbies back then. Little side projects and no one really cared how it was presented. It reminds me of my Southpark website that I maintained with each episode a summary and some screenshots. I spend quite a bit time on it, with my little counter hitting 1,000 views at some point(maybe I was half of that).
2) the web was not created for mobile. Everything is pretty awful, and not accessible. Reader view is not functional and it hinders absorbing the knowledge from these pages.
But I do feel there was a larger diversity, maybe I’m too locked in to social media and Google.
While I do not dream of this man, I found it fascinating. I don’t know how I’d come across this now. Even more interesting to me is what happens when you get rid of the oldsite part of the url… the new site is so much worse! General blog like template, theoretically more mobile friendly except way less visually attractive and interesting.
Indeed. Sites were sites, and someone's personality (and perhaps designer limitations) showed on it. I think with blogging things changed, people saw more opportunity to become an authority on topics rather than just putting their stuff 'out there' for fun.
And afterwards, the web became horribly centralised.
Not sure about the technique wiby uses to filter garbage, but I could imagine a search index that contains only HTML4 pages could be quite resourceful.
Nice idea. Another option albeit way more reliant and resource intensive, checking the wayback machine for page is very old + content hasn't changed much. A lot of these alt search engines look at signals of lack of JS and tracking but that is sort-of a cross-section of more non-commercial stuff.
