finding the small web

the small web is a vague definition for personal and original websites on the internet. rather than a website being owned and run by a large for-profit company, serving ads and various other ways to make money.

its a quite nice place actually. people share their thoughts and have blogs (just like this one) all over the place, however most of them are just hidden by google and other search engines, since they want the user to see the most ads and the "best" results. thus finding those websites can be quite difficult. however there are some alternative search engines, that id like to present to you;

wiby.me

wiby is a small search engine, with its own search index. it focusses on hobbyists, academics and computer savvy people sharing stuff about subjects that they are/were personally interested in.

to submit a page, you actually need to submit it manually rather than a crawler just scouring the internet. it also doesn't accept pages with much ads, too much css or js. also it is open source!!

greppr.org

it presents itself as a search engine with "no filters", "no tracking", "no ai" and "no ads". this is a search engine, where you do not need to manually submit pages, however it also doesn't use a large index, but rather has its own.

from my findings, it has quite a bit more websites than wiby, however it still shows some results, that google would hide behind the 500th page of google. if you actually want to use a search engine from here, i would probably recommend this search engine. (i think i will try to switch to this search engine actually)

marginalia-search.com

this search engine has commertial content, however it prioritizes non-commertial content. (such as small-web websites) it uses its own index and crawler and also doesn't use any ai. also it is fully open source.

this is also a quite nice search engine, embracing smaller independent websites. it encourages the user to use the web as a human and not just as a number.

searchmysite.net

searchmysite has a similar concept to marginalia-search and wiby. it prefers content from real people. it presents itself as a search engine for the indie web.

it also provides "search as a service". if you want to add search functinoality for your website, but don't want to set it up by yourself, you can use this service.

LeoSearch

i actually think, that this is based on the wiby search engine, since it has quite simmilar texts in some places. it us created by one person called "leo". it has a rather small index of about 26'000 pages, however i think those are curated quite well.

search

this entry comes after the initial blog post. i found it trough some people on the sr.ht irc chat. thanks to them. this is a very small search engine and has a own index. it is a hyper-personal search engine, that you locally host on your own hardware.

even more

i found most of those search engines from another blog post; seirdy.one, however i dont think that it is quite accurate anymore. for example; greppr now has over 34 million indexed pages instead of 3 million at the time of writing the linked article. also someone might find my opinion interesting.