Searching the internet...

Search engines went from difficult to amazing to difficult again.

Once Upon A Time if you wanted to find anything online you had to use multiple search engines with a variety of specific search terms, spelled absolutely correctly, using boolean operators.

Google Search, with the motto "don't be evil," burst onto the scene already a legend. Suddenly you only needed one search engine. Suddenly you could spell things incorrectly or use a bunch of different keywords without linking them as carefully.

Google, Bing, and other common search engines are increasingly... not great. They return the same small handful of results and more and more they're infested with incorrect language learning model results advising people to use glue to keep hot cheese on pizza or eat a certain amount of rocks a day.

There's other options, though! Some of them are general search engines, and others are targeted for certain areas or are curated carefully. Take a look and see how they work for you!

  • Marginalia
  • The Wayback Machine, a searchable archive of old websites.
  • The WWW Virtual Library was "started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and of the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva." It's less of a search engine and more of a catalog.
  • Elephind is a catalog of historic newspapers.
  • SearXNG is a metasearch engine. It aggregates results from other search engines, and doesn't store information about users.
  • GifCities, a gif search engine powered by The Internet Archive.
  • Old'aVista, a play on the name of the old search enginge AltaVista, searches old personal web sites scraped from The Internet Archive.
  • Search My Site, which searches user-submitted personal websites.
  • VHSearch searches neocities websites.
  • Board Reader searches message boards and forums.
  • Dogpile launched in 1995 as one of the first meta search engines and still exists.
  • Open Verse is a Creative Commons search engine that looks for copyright-free content.
  • Neosearch specifically searches Neocities sites.
  • NASA Images, a searchable database of NASA photographs.
  • Webcrawler is one of the first meta search engines and is still kicking.