+1, I forgot about Monoskop, a truly fascinating resource.
Another interesting one is Aaaaarg (according to Monoskop's wiki, originally with one less "a", acronym of Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group):
Basically it's a collaborative environment for reading, annotating and discussing texts. The content is submitted by users and (thus) of high quality.
I think you need an invite to access the community. Also, the domain used to be aaaaarg.org, but I think they faced copyright issues of some kind and had to find an alternative domain. (Not sure about this; excellent new suffix, though!)
Possible contrarian insight: in the era of recommendation systems, hand-curation is due a big comeback.
I’ve been listening to the BBC’s Introducing Mixtape podcast for a while. I also use Spotify and really enjoy its recommendation but the 6 Music podcast is just stellar.
As paywalls restore quality journalism, I believe a renaissance for curated content is possible.
Interesting - what would the evidence that current paywalls are/have restored quality journalism be?
As in, do you believe this uptick in quality journalism has already happened/is happening? And what associates it with paywalls? Presumably you'd have to be seeing quality journalism behind paywalls for this to be case?
For the past two weeks I have been trying to find an old website by searching for "old mysterious site search engines" and "how to search deep parts of web" and "search engine tricks old site" and Google has not returned anything, even when I limited the time span to 2005-2006.
I made the same search on Wilby and it returned search lores (maintained by the hacker Fravia) as the first result! I was so happy to find that website again because I haven't been on it for 10 years. Unfortunately I just found out that Fravia passed away in 2009 because of cancer :(...
Wiby seems like a search engine Fravia would have enjoyed.
I'm surprised you had trouble finding Fravia. When I was writing my own Internet search guide ( https://www.gwern.net/Search ) recently, I had no trouble finding Fravia. Unfortunately, his guide is obsolete at this point and I didn't get much out of it.
Thankyou for the link to your search guide - this looks tremendous! Especially when searching for a specific answer to something. I wonder what you think about discovery when you are looking for something unknown within certain parameters... Like, say you are looking for an "interesting film blog" - a search term like that will often lead to pages of "Top 10 Movie Blogs" lists that are all largely clickbait or not that interesting. Do you have any advice for that kind of search? (Perhaps you cover this in the guide, but I missed it in my scan - I thought I would ask while you are here.)
I'm no gwern, but here's how I do discovery. To find a page on the internet, you need to hand a search engine something that can be reasonably expected to be on that page. So if you want to find an interesting film blog, you should not use that as a search term, because you'll find lists of blogs, not the blogs themselves. Rather, you should probably use the titles of interesting movies.
There are many ways you could seed that search, but as totally-not-a-movie-buff I decided to check IMDb's list of lowest rated movies [1] and chose a title further down the list (The Wicker Man), on the theory that only dedicated people would be talking about movies that are bad, but not bad enough to be the worst. Searching for blogs (as identified by inurl:blog) mentioning "The Wicker Man" [2] does turn up a few promising results, like [3].
This is good advice - thankyou! I have definitely used this kind of approach before, it requires some creativity. It feels like there are possibly dozens of ways of approaching this - and obviously unlimited kinds of 'seeds' (as you say) for the search. I'm definitely looking for a guide that might encompass this kind of strategy.
my favorite part about search lores wasn't the actual tips on how to google, but his writing style and the mysterious, almost occult feeling i got from visiting that website, with latin phrases and history strewn everywhere. Thanks for your guide though, ill chek it out :)
Just checked out millionshort and wiby. And those are absolutely awesome resources (click on remove top e.g. million in millionshort)!
In my opinion there has to be widespread fatigue of Google just somehow managing to return a large chunk of something like 1,000 sites for pretty much any search. It's in part SEO, but it's also like the article mentions - Google makes money from ads. These sites they spam at you generate substantial revenue for Google - no name sites do not. Being the world's largest advertising corporation and search engine is one hell of a conflict of interest in terms of delivering what the user wants, instead of delivering what Google wants.
Wiby seems amazing - the first three surprise me links were a human powered ornithopter, lego maniacs and a guide to knife throwing. Thank you for sharing!
The group mostly converses on micro.blog. I cover the various conversations and new discoveries on my site (kickscondor.com). Do you just want to follow along? Or do you have some ideas to share?
This is a very new group that has sprung up in the last few months.
I was just reading along this thread and wracking my brains trying to think of this one site that I had seen which curated interesting websites and up popped your comment and I was like ding ding ding then back down the rabbit hole!
Glad this is becoming more organized and I will follow along with interest.
It brings back a little of the wonder of the old web.
A smaller subset somehow seems bigger, more infinite.
We're among those that believe there is room in the search space. We're building out our hyper local product search service city by city at https://attic.city. It's meant to fill the void with regard to smaller, non-chain stores that Google shopping seems to focus on.
For sure - and there are several others like it: illumirate.com, joeant.com, skaffe.com, gimpsy.com, seekon.info, goguides.org, somuch.com.
I'm personally not a fan of directories that try to tackle the _entire_ web - it's just too sprawling. So I tend to not recommend them; you have to drill down pretty deep to get anywhere. I think 'awesome' directories (and Reddit wikis) have proven how well niche directories can work - and so I like to encourage folks to build their own directories that encompass their personal view of the web. They act like those 'little libraries' you see on the roadside or at pubs - but for the web.
it's almost like we need a way to aggregate these sites and rate pages based on tags and how many people list their site. maybe not in the traditional del.icio.us sense but also as a potentially self hosted thing.
As long as the search engine still works, I<m happy. I<ve been using it quite a bit lately to dig up old musician interviews that either don<t exist on Google search or are buried behind mountains of keyword-optimized blogspam with that artist<s name.
A few helpful search engines:
* https://millionshort.com/
* https://wiby.me/
* https://pinboard.in/search/
A recent movement to build personal Yahoo!-style directories:
* https://href.cool/ (my own project)
* https://indieseek.xyz/
* https://districts.neocities.org/
* https://the.dailywebthing.com/
The above resources are focused on general blogging and personal websites - for software and startups, I would refer to the appropriate 'awesome' directories. (https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome or https://awesomelists.top)
If you know of any more, please list them - a small group of us are collecting these and trying to encourage new projects.