Links of Note

Since the new web and its search engines are basically broken, here are a variety of links which you might find of interest in your web browsing.

• General Navigation
• Wiby: This is a "search engine for the classic web." It's a curated search of only "Web 1.0" type websites. This means a lot of abandoned sites and a lot of amateur sites, but some results are quite professional. In any case, the results will be more interesting than what you get on a standard search engine.
• Curlie: The Collector of URLs. This is basically a web directory, much like Yahoo in its classic days. The results are similar to Wiby, though I don't think that that is decreed. The results are supposed to be any active website, but it is user run and of course the type of people who add things to this sort of directory would be more interested in Web 1.0 style sites.
• Brave Search: A general purpose search engine by the same people who make the browser. After a lot of comparative testing this seems to be the best all purpose search engine out there. It uses its own webcrawlers, unlike many alternative search engines (which usually rely on Google, Bing or a combination thereof.) There are some blind spots, especially in terms of hot button news issues and the usual AI created pages, but the web is so bloated with crap that I'm not sure if this sort of stuff is possible to avoid with a non-curated search.
• Gif Cities: A idiosyncratic search engine for gifs that come entirely from archived geocities pages. Seems like a joke at first, but is actually a good way to grab neat animated gifs that have a certain "vintage" to them.
• Cloud Hiker: A successor to stumbleupon. That is, continue clicking to get random sites from a curated list. I'm not thrilled by some of how this is presented and the fact that it heavily encourages you to make a profile, but it does work as a way to find all sorts of websites that you would never come across in searches.
• Old Tech/Web Stuff
• Gophie: An open source browser for travelling through Gopherspace. Yes, there are still gopher pages still up and some people are still tinkering with their pages there. In a way gopher browsing is the web at its most pure: just information and links.
• TinTin++: A browser for MUDs. These also still exist, though often an "active MUD" means "a MUD with 10 or so people who join at some time during the week." So don't expect to have much interaction. However, it can be fascinating to go through old MUDs alone, as sort of an expedition to ancient ruins.
• RGB Classic Games: I am mainly interested in the drivers page which is the easiest place to get the Soundblaster drivers and S3 drivers you will need to have a decent setup. But the page also contains many other emulation tools and shrines to various old games like Microman. There are a couple of other sites like this that I make use of a lot too, but as they are, shall we say, a bit looser with what sort of software they allow to be posted, I'm not going to link to them here.
• Kliktopia: A repository of old games made with Klik and Play and related software. Most won't run easily on modern windows. It's better to emulate Windows 3.1, 95 or 98. The site does offer tweaks you can try to have them work on modern windows though.
• The Web Design Museum: This has screenshots of various webpages and software throughout the years. I found it when making an article that would have looked at Yahoo! year by year, only to find that this page already did it. I may still write the article in the future to comment on the importance of the changes, but if you just want to see what Yahoo or other pages looked like in the past this site is great. The Internet Archive works well for this sort of stuff too, of course, but the Web Design Museum goes back further, is easier to browse, and also captures old layout for software.
• One Terabyte of the Kilobyte Age: A blog discussing findings from an archive of old geocities pages. Sometimes it is just showing cool stuff, other times it gets more into the philosphy of the web. I particularly like this post, which demonstrates that many of the features of the web that people claim to be "Web 2.0" exclusive actually existed even on Geocities (Most were done better elsewhere at the time, but the site only has the geocities data so that's where they focus.)
• Web Design Stuff
• Transparent Textures: A neat tool for making backgrounds through combinations of images and background colors. There isn't much information on the site itself, but as it is a successor to Subtle Patterns, which is all open source, I take it that these are distributed under an open source license as well. (The subtle patterns website was bought out by an web design company, making it suspect.)
• Other Interesting Sites
• Kaomoji Navigation: a Japanese directory (up since 2001!) of various Japanese style emoticons like ∩(≡･　x　･≡)∩ or （;ﾟＯﾟ). The navigation is going to be tricky for those of you who don't read Japanese, but just click randomly and you'll eventually get stuff. A cool site as a time capsule of early JP internet culturea, and actually useful for finding emoticons.
• No Name Anime: A site for a defunct anime club, but the site itself isn't completely abandoned. (As of the time of posting this link, the last update was May 2024.) The coolest bit is probably "Megumi Toons", some scanlations of a manga about Megumi Hayashibara, but there a few other pages about anime and some neat archives with posters for the event going back to 1993. Unfortunately most of the links are dead, but I like that they are still up both due to giving a good sense of what anime was like in the 00's era of the internet, and being good URLs to investigate with archive services.
• Windows 93: A "parody" of Windows 95, but really a shrine to internet and PC culture going from 2012 or so backwards.

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