[HN Gopher] Wiby.me: curated search engine for content-first suc...
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Wiby.me: curated search engine for content-first suckless sites
Author : nateb2022
Score : 74 points
Date : 2022-10-28 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiby.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiby.me)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Works perfectly in w3m over Tor and returns useful and
| interesting results in a fraction of a second. Bravo!
| phtrivier wrote:
| Yeah, the first result of the "surprise me" search is an
| early-2000s era style 9/11 conspiracy site. Brings back memories,
| but not exactly "suckless".
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| "suckless" often means for websites; loads quickly and does not
| overuse JavaScript.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Renders poorly on an iPhone (way too small).
|
| Searched for wow, got a lot of fishing sites. That was
| surprising.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well most results are desktop sites. Mobile users probably
| aren't the intended audience.
| paxys wrote:
| The site's definition of "content-first suckless" is more or less
| synonymous with "created before 2005". Which is fine if you are
| into that aesthetic, but it is a terrible way to judge the value
| of the content itself. A few lines of CSS to set sensible
| margins, spacing and text contrast isn't the end of the world.
| Heck even Wikipedia is not "content-first" enough to be included
| in the results. And it doubly sucks for those who are expecting
| the tiniest bit of accessibility on the internet.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Plain HTML typically has great accessibility. Its when you
| start adding CSS and scripts it worsens.
| CJefferson wrote:
| What damage does CSS do to screen readers and accessiblity?
| I've used several accessible browsers it has never bothered
| any of them.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| CSS can completely change the position and semantics of a
| tag.
|
| Floats, z-index and position:absolute/relative are
| especially tricky.
| paxys wrote:
| Try using a screen reader on a website that uses HTML tables
| for layout and you will quickly realize how wrong that
| statement is.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Eh, can work pretty well compared to CSS. Table cells are
| always in the order they appear on screen, and if you read
| them in sequence the order makes sense. That does not apply
| with CSS based designs.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Wiby is a great example of how welll a curated index cam perform.
|
| I've been toying with the idea of like crowd sourced index
| curation. Like maybe backed off a git repo or something. Would be
| an interesting experiment.
| wawayanda wrote:
| Well, I just popped an inocuous search term ("dinosaurs") in
| there and the very first result was a page with the title:
|
| "Evidence That Humans And Dinosaurs Coexisted"
|
| So that actually kind of sucks.
| throwaway5371 wrote:
| this is absolutely amazing
|
| i love it
| generalizations wrote:
| But on the same page of results you also get things like this:
| http://mlwi.magix.net/synchronicity.htm
|
| I don't see what sucks - we're talking about the WWW here, and
| we should expect the full spectrum of thoughts and opinions.
| Unless you're hoping that each and every boutique search engine
| will filter the results according to your preference?
| cush wrote:
| When ordering results, one would expect the top results to
| contain information mostly pertaining to the search term.
|
| "Dinosaurs" and "my old book says the world is only a few
| thousand years old, therefore I'm going to try to convince
| you that carbon dating is invalid by hand-waving my way to
| the conclusion that Dinosaurs and humans existed at the same
| time" is a bit of a stretch. I'd expect maybe "Triceratops"
| as a result near the top, for example.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| This isn't a search engine that is optimized for quality or
| authenticity of information contained on the sites. It's
| simply a tool for exploring an index of websites that
| follow the guidelines set by the author.
| generalizations wrote:
| Well, it's a webpage exclusively devoted to dinosaurs.
| Dunno what else to say.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think the content not sucking is orthogonal to the design of
| the page not sucking.
| lasfter wrote:
| I took this as a cue and searched some loaded terms.
|
| "vaccines" and "covid 19" had decent results, mostly people's
| blogs and some sites trying to prevent misinformation.
|
| "abortions" mostly gave statistics, a blog by a 14-year old
| student in China, and an extensive collection of writings in
| support of Ayn Rand and against Noam Chomsky.
|
| "trump" gives the most perplexing results, which I don't really
| know how to describe. Interestingly, the Rand/Chomsky page
| shows up here too.
|
| I suppose it depends on your definition of suckless, but all
| the sites that were returned were lightweight, and content-
| first. As for the content... interesting might be the word I'd
| use. And it definitely doesn't show up in mainstream engines.
| nmilo wrote:
| Why does it kind of suck? Let people believe what they want to
| believe. It's not like it makes any difference to your life or
| theirs.
| gerikson wrote:
| I thought it might be a lovingly handcrafted artisinal static
| site at least, but it's very very 90s web design.
| masukomi wrote:
| don't see how "lovingly handcrafted artisinal" and "90s web
| design" are incompatible. ;)
|
| the thing about artisans, is that they create according to
| their specific taste, which may or may not intersect with
| subjective modern tastes. :)
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| A lot of new wave personal websites are using the 1990s as
| inspiration, due to the 1990s having far more web design
| versatility than the utter boring designs that every copies
| nowadays.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Talk about synchronicity, earlier today I was thinking that
| someone like this ought to exist, and here it is!
|
| Thanks for sharing.
| molsongolden wrote:
| The creator's description of the types of sites indexed (from the
| Submit page[0]):
|
| > What kind of pages get indexed?
|
| > Pages must be simple in design. Simple HTML, non-commerical
| sites are preferred.
|
| > Pages should not use much scripts/css for cosmetic effect. Some
| might squeak through.
|
| > Don't use ads that are intrusive (such as ads that appear
| overtop of content).
|
| > Don't submit a page which serves primarily as a portal to other
| bloated websites.
|
| > If you submit a blog, submit a few of your articles, not your
| main feed.
|
| > If your page does not contain any text or uses frames, ensure a
| meta description tag is added.
|
| > Only the page you submit will be crawled.
|
| Some additional ethos info is on the About page[1].
|
| [0] https://wiby.me/submit/
|
| [1] https://wiby.me/about/
| SllX wrote:
| First two things I found with "Surprise Me":
|
| Computer Closet: http://www.computercloset.org/compindex.htm
|
| Guide to Spam-like products: http://spam.budwin.net/
|
| Already a fan.
|
| I'm sure I could find something like this in Google if I tried
| hard enough, but damn, you just don't see this kind of stuff in
| Google anymore (or at least I don't).
|
| EDIT: here's another.
|
| https://www.mrbreakfast.com/
|
| This is fantastic! Based off some of the other comments I don't
| know if this will be a quality search engine, but I think this
| might be the second coming of StumbleUpon.
| Animats wrote:
| Searching for "metaverse":
|
| - Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse -- Bob's Reviews Women in Comics
| Zompist Phrasebook
|
| - Metaverse Christianity and the Problem of Shame
|
| - Piero Scaruffi's knowledge base -- Singularity Metaverse
| Blockchain Virtual Reality A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence
| A.I. slides Future of Technology Tributes Birthdays: a secular
| calendar of saints Centennial
|
| The "sites which suck" filter seems to have left only sites of
| random blithering. After eliminating ad-heavy sites and the usual
| suspects, there's no easy way to rank. Now you need real content
| evaluation. Which is really hard.
|
| You'd probably get better results by searching maybe 50 sites,
| such as Wikipedia and Brittanica for general knowledge, and a few
| just-the-facts new sites (Reuters, BBC, Japan Times, the
| Economist, the Guardian.) omitting their opinion articles. For
| popular culture, go for the trades - Variety, Chartbeat, etc.
| nmilo wrote:
| A search engine that's just Wikipedia and Reuters sounds like
| the most boring website on the planet. Sometimes people don't
| want "just the facts," all the time. Sometimes they just want
| to have fun. And obviously "metaverse" won't yield many results
| in a 90s-style-website search engine.
| skyfaller wrote:
| This is apparently FOSS under the GPLv2:
| https://github.com/wibyweb/wiby/
|
| FWIW I don't see any mention of suckless on Wiby itself, so the
| headline may be misleading. As someone who has a negative
| impression of the suckless community, despite agreeing with their
| goals of "keeping things simple, minimal and usable", this
| matters.
| laserdancepony wrote:
| Suckless for me stands primary for the idea, only secondary for
| the suckless.org crowd.
| saperyton wrote:
| This is great. I would love to see engines of custom curated
| content, like the readsomethinginteresting.com blogs or
| academic articles.
| cush wrote:
| I love this. I searched for guitar and every result felt like a
| geocities site circa 1997.
| laserdancepony wrote:
| It's kind of funny how many commenters expect all results
| filtered to their liking. Most often when the topic comes up, the
| crowd often denounces Google et al preselecting content. Can't
| have your cake and eat it, too.
|
| Have you ever tried scrolling over things you don't like?
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(page generated 2022-10-28 23:01 UTC)