[whage]

Reading through the comments here (and very much feeling the pain they describe), this idea came: Shouldn't we have a search engine that heavily favours the types of websites that we typically look for? You know, the classic 90s style tech blogs, the plain HTML documentation pages. Ignoring websites with ads, sites with lots of baggage (fonts, scripts, whatnot), sites with lots of images. Maybe increase the ranking of pages that don't change much in their look and content as time goes by. I don't know. Would it be useful? How would it pay for itself?

[rchaud]

What you're describing is an internet that hasn't existed since 2006, or whenever Jquery and Ajax started becoming mainstream.

Sites containing "fonts and scripts" are not baggage. They have just been updated for modern times. Sites have to measure traffic somehow, and it's not going to be via a "Guest Counter" widget like they had back in the Geocities days.

You might be looking for an alt-web like that hosted on the Gemini network. It's all text and HTML-only as I understand.

[debesyla]

Are you talking about Marginalia? [https://search.marginalia.nu/]

[powerhour]

Remember Hotbot? They had a way to limit searches to those that used JavaScript. ha!

https://wikieducator.org/File:Hotbot.gif

[superkuh]

millionshort.com used to be good but it recently joined the mega-corp search pack and hid it's search engine behind required code exectution that blocks non-megacorp browsers.

https://searchmysite.net/ is a curated search for exactly what you describe though. It's been on HN a couple times.