The web is a painful place these days. Clicking on a random link can lead to a bloated page full of pop-ups, prompts, disclaimers, and intrusive ads. If your page contains useful content, you may have to wade through a swamp of junk to extract it. But even more likely, the random web page you click on will be filled with thin, useless content. To make matters worse, the text was written by ChatGPT and wasn’t even human-skimmed before publication.
This never happened before. From the 1990s to the halcyon days of the early 2000s, the web was a strange and wonderful place. Web pages are created by hobbyists who want to share their interests with the world. They didn’t care about search engine optimization or marketing funnels. Honestly, I had to surf the web to find what was out there.
Long before Google came along and conquered the open web, almost everything on the internet was word of mouth. Search engines existed, but they were essentially useless. Instead, you had to browse web directories to find a site you liked and visit the sites linked to it. Even before anyone came up with the word, it was almost 100% human-curated. One page could have many topics, and there were all kinds of topics sprinkled in there. low resolution buttons due to various reasons.
Back then, the web was strange, wild, often perplexing, and highly complex. human. Then along came Google and Web 2.0, and over time, websites became clean, minimalist, topic-focused, and lean. What used to be a wasteland has been transformed into a suburban shopping mall that now feels like a run-down shopping mall in a dangerous part of town.
Unfortunately, that strange and wild frontier nest is long gone. Or is it?
Search the old web with Wiby
If you want a little taste of the old internet, visit these sites: Wybee me. Wiby is a search engine that specializes in preserving and redisplaying the original web.as Wiby creator explains:
In the early days of the Web, pages were created primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people on topics of personal interest. Then the web became saturated with commercial pages, overcrowding everything else. All personalized websites are hidden among a ton of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them, but it focuses on finding answers to technical questions and it does a good job. But the real fun of surfing the web, finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, no longer happens. Furthermore, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add fancy appearance features to hide the lack of available content. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today’s Web.The Wiby search engine is building the web of pages, just as it was in the early days of the Internet. Additionally, Wiby helps vintage computers keep browsing the web because indexed pages are better for performance.
Although Wiby is a search engine, it does not replace Google for everyday searches. Because it only indexes a very small number of traditional websites, you may not get the results you expect. But that’s not really what Wiby is about.
Don’t know what to search for in Wiby? Click on “Surprise me…” and you’ll be taken to other weird and wonderful destinations, including:
With Wiby, you’ll feel like you’re really surfing the web again, and you can easily kill an afternoon clicking on random sites. This is a reminder that the internet doesn’t have to be a bland, sterile place full of bloated pop-ups and marketing copy. There is still a lot of human internet. To see it, you’ll have to step out of the safe confines of Google.
If you’re interested in what Wiby is doing to preserve the classic web, consider: donate to them to cover their expenses.
