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by dogcow 3148 days ago
Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me

From their about page:

Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were 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 those gems, 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.

12 comments

That site reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
yes.This part of site is from Douglas Adam words.
My favorite website: http://www.otherhand.org/

And my favorite article on it: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...

(No association)

I guess these days unless you are located in EU or North America or not from VPN you get to suffer messages like:

Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503)

Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons

Yep, I'm on VPN right now, and I'm blocked.

But thank goodness for the Internet Archive! (FWIW, I've donated several times, it has helped me out so many times)

The article of interest is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170920090047/http://www.otherh...

It is also limited in the EU.
I was greeted with this message - 'Your access to this site has been limited.'
That article was a fascinating read. Thank you.
Ah yes, I remember stumbling into this page when looking for cold-case/solved mystery stories. I got through all 13 pages in one afternoon! Excellent story and writing.
Wow, I just read that search story as well - fascinating!
yes, absolutely....
At first glance that feels like a different kind of spin on Ted the Caver.
I started to work on something like it. With intention of filtering-out ad-serving websites first (thanks to EasyList filtering rules) and heavy-JS second. I'm glad that someone already did something like this.

Is there some more information about it? I found that it is done by https://www.wireservice.ca Is there a technical info?

I was wondering how big the index is. Because it may be just possible to serve the multi-gigabyte index with torrent. Then the update mechanism would serve only deltas. It could be then used locally. However index would probably have to be without content - so no snippets. I don't know if it would be useful that way.

It could use a comparison site. Side by side with Google for the same search. I would certainly want to use it this way for a while.

I think this is the way for the alternative search engine to somewhat succeed. Because I think it's almost impossible to compete with Google at being Google. Look at how Bing manages.

I agree! I'd never thought of using tor, but I had very similar ideas about an engine that doesn't index a site if it has ads, etc. I had an idea of using a delayed response in order to lessen the hardware requirements. So a user submits a query, then checks back later for a response. A little bit like a traditional library, haha! Anyway, i'm really glad to hear others are doing similar stuff, I think there is a market. The info is out there, it's just lost in a sea of noise.
You might be interested in Ted Unangst's miniwebproxy:

https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/miniwebproxy

I searched "hamster" and got two results, the first of which was on rectal foreign bodies. Ah, the internet is back to the way it ought to be!
> But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know...

... is exactly the thing that I'm most worried about losing. Especially when I hear about all sorts of "adaptive" crap that learns about what I do and adjusts my daily feeds, search results etc. accordingly. It probably works great for most people, but I'm definitely not one of them and I want to opt out of the adaptiveness of modern Web. Most of the time there is no clear way of doing that.

I really dislike youtube's 'recommended videos' for exactly this reason. It will never show me anything interesting, because it thinks I only want to watch things that I've already watched.
I find things that I didn't know that I wanted to know through Wikipedia.
I hit "Surprise me" and first site it hits autodownloads a .mid file, that used to work better I 'member.
I hit "Surprise me" and got this gem: http://g2mil.com.

I like that search site already.

Great quote from this one:

> What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity.

> Paul Fussell

Thanks for that! Superbly informative website.

Someone, quick - point Ukraine and the Baltic states to this article "The Tank is Dead": http://g2mil.com/Anti-armor.htm

Aand, come Russkies (that's what you meant, right?), Ukraine and the Baltic states would be dead by frontline bombers (look at Syria, American and Russian tactics are not all that different in that respect) and advanced artillery. Look, ma, no tanks!
Well, it's (literally!) a disruptive technology introduced into the mix...

"US and Baltic troops — and American airpower — would be unable to halt the advance of mechanized Russian units and would suffer heavy casualties in the process" (https://en.delfi.lt/lithuania/defence/russia-could-occupy-al...)

BTW, this was a study from Rand Corporation!

I tried searching for "cyclocross", a slightly obscure cycling niche, perfect for a search engine like this, you might think? Unfortunately, no one has curated any content around that topic :(
I am going to lose so many hours to this. Thanks!
Haha if look for google under the url it says: "a wise guy eh? ಠ_ಠ"
found: http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die

(fwiw, author appears to be a Rails developer)