For some long forgotten reason, I was reading a post on Hacker News forums the other day. (Probably something to do with the small web). While moseying on through the replies a link was made to a really spiffy search engine that I'd never heard of. It's called wiby.me and it has become my new favorite thing. A big reason I'm so enamoured with it is likely to do with how most of the results are for sites at least 20 years old (and haven't been updated in equally as long), but more on that in a sec.

The place is designed as open source so people who want to make their own tailored search engine that is focused on whatever nifty topics tickle their fancy can go ahead and do so. I'm nowhere near technically inclined to do something like that and am also very lazy so probably wouldn't bother even if I could.

As such, it's been an exciting week of slapping in queries and seeing what Wiby serves up. Being someone in their mid-40s with fond memories of the early web, a lot of sites have been fun trips down memory lane. Most of the sites that come up in searches are not necessarily the ones I remember while cutting my teeth on the web two and a half decades ago. However, they were certainly cut from the same cloth, exuding a similar approach to aesthetics. Sure, young'uns coming up now will call them old and archaic, but as far as I'm concerned they're *magic*.

A lot of the sites are very old, and I do wonder if the people running Wiby have made things this way on purpose. Search results have brought up a ton of fan sites for various topics from the late 80s and early 90s. Granted many of my searches were directed towards older video games, anime, and other such topics more likely to skew this way. I came across a ton of gaming home pages that were updated quite regularly from the late 90s to the early 2000s.

Even pivoting to more current search topics tended to bring up ancient results. A search for World of Warcraft brought up a bunch of sites that haven't been updated since The Burning Crusade / Wrath of the Lich King. A search for BBC News gave me a bunch of pages from the mid 2000s. A search for CNN provided a link from 1999 telling people how to remove Internet Explorer from Windows 98.

Occasionally, I'd come across some current sites as well, but they were ones that I'd never heard of. They all were designed like they were created in 1998 as well. There were a lot of random tech and gaming news sites like this. Modern search engines probably hate these sites and punish them in the algorithms because they don't adhere to all of the SEO practices prominent today. One stand out was for a retro gaming translation ring that makes ROM hacks of various games into Romanian. For some reason, all of their announcements are in English, but they appear to have put out more than a few translations over the years.

With all that in mind, I'm not sure if Wiby.me will helpful to many people who need cutting edge information relevant to the here and now. Those who want to pretend like it's always May 5, 2003 will love it. So, it may just be up the alley of those who like spending their time reading Gemini capsules. Just oodles of sites with simple designs and a lot of heart. Also corporate sites before they become breathtakingly privacy invasive, bloated plagues on the land.

Anyway, Wiby.me may not be a practical site, but it's a lot of fun. Maybe give it a look some time.

Pennywhether

penneywhether@posteo.net

August 9, 2022