The "About" information is, counter-intuitively, under "Settings":
> In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. [...] The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.
That makes me think: Is there a search engine which removes pages with any ads or affiliate links? That might be the easiest way to remove the commercial pages.
I was just thinking pages with external dependencies, in the spirit of the old web, but your idea sounds a lot more reasonable. Not sure if that exists, I'd be interested!
It is a carefully curated directory, which is problematic.
For example, I submitted Pizza Hut's archived original web page [1], but it wasn't added.
Even for a search engine exposing niches, updating a directory manually will likely be too slow, unless the directory is maintaining a single nich (e.g., unladen airspeed of every species of swallow), but then we end up with some insane number of search engines and how to select which one?
Especially if you’re focussing on evergreen information, there’s no reason why people can’t have their own personalized crawler and index— I’ve occasionally thought about rolling my own with a browser extension that lets me add seeds at the click of a button.
I've been working on something like this for my own use - I'm not a fan of browser-based history. My home-rolled solution is starting to be good enough where I can use it to easily find exactly what I'm looking for, assuming I've previously read it, by both searching the title and URL, as well as the content on that page (my major gripe with "History" in Chrome and Firefox is that it doesn't search the page content, and if it did, syncing it would have major privacy concerns).
The problem I'm running into is that I still have to use major search engines to find new content, way more than I'd like. I hope to make my local service available open source once I have 'federated' history search working, so that we can have a primitive search engine and share with people we trust. Also need to work out some security issues - it's scary having all the content you read and see on your home network, protected only by your hackily-patched-together security.
EDIT: Actually I'd like to elaborate a bit more in case anybody actually reads this and has any ideas. On the desktop side, it's pretty easy. Initially started out MITMing my own traffic with a self-signed cert added as a root cert to all my machines. This only works on my home network, so I did a VPN thing. This was way to clunky and the security concerns are innumerable. I ended up biting the bullet and writing a chrome extension which works wonderfully, except for some slight performance issues.
However, I wish to also archive my phone content - I read just as much on my phone as my computer. I can do it on Android with the MITM process, but the same issues as above still apply, and it doesn't work with iOS (at least I can't find a way).
I'm thinking of taking an open source project, like Firefox/Fennec and building it in to the app itself. In that case it may make sense to forgo the browser extension and just roll my own forked browser on every platform, even iOS. I don't know much about iOS dev though.
I tried this yesterday. It seems biased towards the interests of the curators, and, like Google in regards to "some ideal average consumer", is therefore useless if you fall outside a certain level of similarity to the target demo.
For example, I enjoy weightlifting and strength sports. I did a search for "muscle", and every result but one was using the word "muscle" as a figurative metaphor. Barely anything about actual muscles. Searching "funk" was just as bad. One page about Motown and a LOT of midis.
What if Google Advanced Search produced a visual network map which showed you the salient clusters of terms related to your search? You’d then be able to click on a cluster and the search results would change to adjust to what you’re really searching for.
Ex: The network map for “weightlifting” would include many clusters, but 2 big ones would be the hypertrophic cluster (surrounded by a bunch of related terms) and toning cluster (calisthenics would be under this cluster for example). Click on either and the results will change accordingly.
This would actually work even better for subjects you don’t know much about, because Google will teach you about the salient clusters in that field. The clusters could be enhanced with popular images associated with each term. Popular clusters would display as larger than others.
