Comment by miramba
1 year ago
I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/
It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
Wow. I see this as proof web surfing died because the Big Search Engines prefer to promote commercial entities over individual interests.
I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill.
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
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Yeah, this has been my thesis from the beginning, and the Marginalia search engine is basically constructed to verify this hypothesis. It's easy to dismiss such a notion when it's just words. It's much harder to brush off a more tangible demonstration.
Really missing a way to sort by recency, that would make it far more useful for me.
Easy enough. Added a toggle for showing results that are <2 years old. May need to tune it a bit I guess (maybe 5 years).
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
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Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice much difference from Google.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.
Are you sure that's the correct URL? That site is a near-default Wordpress site with a single Hello World post from 2018.
I believe he means to say https://wiby.me
> I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there.
Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.
Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
You're (maybe) inadvertently on to something there,
> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web" was a way to pass the time. For many it was a cultural curiosity first, then an entertainment source. At some point it pivoted to being work. It turned into filing taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for maintaining a "professional profile". From what I see of social media a great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the serious web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so the headspace of "passtime" has itself sort of vanished.
Have you heard of https://www.marginalia.nu/ in general, and especially the https://search.marginalia.nu/ from there?
search.marginalia.nu is one option. Apparently Kagi also has a "Small Web" option. Check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821248
They're still there. When I stumble upon them I take note and gather them into this web gallery. Well Made Web, the old town of the Internet:
https://wmw.thran.uk
Agreed that SEO garbage has made it very hard to find good websites
That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)