Tag: search engines

  • Discover the real internet with Wiby

    Discover the real internet with Wiby

    In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally 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. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

    — Wiby Search Engine · wiby.me/about

    And it’s literally that. Wiby is a vast collection of sites that were or look like they were built in 1999, but many of them are still maintained today. 

    Like most search engines, there’s a bunch of commands you can add to your searches to tweak results. Details on the settings page. For those that don’t really know what they are looking for, there’s a Surprise Me! option which takes you to a random site in the search index.

    And if you wanted to use it as your default search, adding !g or !b to the start of your search will kick you over to Google or Bing.

    A screenshot of Wiby search engine as of 13 February 2022

    I’ve found it useful to use a few times when wanting to explore the web and my commercial search engine of choice is just giving me results to the walled-gardens of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, eBay, Reddit, etc.

    Searching with Wiby is different: 


    I love it. All of it. I’m eager to donate to Wiby.

    Wiby really makes me feel like there are people on the web still carving out their own hobbyist spaces – something which I thought was lost to the closed groups and subreddits of big corporate sites.

    I might even set it as my default search engine.

    wiby.me

  • Searching… 🔎

    Searching… 🔎

    Where do you go when you want to find something on the internet? If you are like most people, you start at Google. Over the last year, a whopping 92% of searches conducted were with the Silicon Valley tech giants. But where do the other 8% go?

    There are actually many alternatives to searching the web with Google. Once you scratch beneath the surface you’ll find a range of search engines all promoting a slightly nuanced set of features.

    DuckDuckGo is a US-based search engine that claims to be private. Unlike Google, they don’t remember what you search for and promise to not track you. The results they show? Well, they mix together results from two other search engines – Bing and Yandex.

    Ecosia is another alternative to Google. Based in Germany, they promise that 80% of their profits will go to tree-planting projects. The results they show? Also taken from Microsoft Bing.

    In fact, if we zoom out, there are only six search engines that scan the web and rely on their own catalogue of the internet:

    1. Google (USA)
    2. Microsoft Bing (USA)
    3. Gigablast (USA)
    4. Brave Search (USA)*
    5. Yandex (Russia)
    6. Mojeek (UK)

    * Note that Brave Search use Google as a ‘Fallback’ when they don’t have enough results of their own.

    Competition is healthy for the internet and what’s healthy for the internet will ultimately be good for you. Google having a monopoly on web searches is not healthy.

    And so, dear reader, we have reached that part of the post where I make a radical suggestion. If you currently use Google to search the web then maybe you should… switch?

    Try Bing. Try Ecosia. Try Qwant or DuckDuckGo. Why not go back in time and use Yahoo or AOL. Give Mojeek a shot – they are one of the only six indexing the web!

    Set one of the above as your default search engine and see how it goes. For most searches, I’m sure you’ll find the answer you’re looking for. And, for the few times you don’t? Well, Google it.

  • Links of the week: Planting trees, hacker news & self-reflection

    Links of the week: Planting trees, hacker news & self-reflection

    Some weeks you can feel like you can do a lot but have nothing to show for it. This week almost feels like one of those weeks. I have been busy, but I can’t tell you what I’ve done. And not because I am keeping it a secret.

    This weekend is coming to a close. Amid meeting friends and volunteering at the Red Cross, we managed to clean the apartment, put up some picture frames and take a nice walk through Oslo.

    Here’s a round up of things that have happened elsewhere:


    A photo of a green tree

    Planting trees in Australia

    Ecosia, the search engine that promises to plant trees around the globe, is putting 100% of it’s profits from this Thursday towards planting native, subtropical trees in the Byron Bay area of Australia.

    All the details of the initiative are on the Ecosia blog. If you needed an excuse to move away from Google, at least for a day, there isn’t a better reason. Try it now.


    A screenshot of the website copychar.cc in Brave browser on Mac OS

    ℃opy ⅋ Ƥaste

    Do you often need a special character in your writing, but you don’t know the secret keyboard shortcut? You need CopyChar. Just click or tap on a character and it will be copied to your clipboard.

    I used to use CopyPasteCharacter for the same job, but they use Flash player and that’s dead wood.


    A picture of Saudi Arabia's crown prince meeting Jeff Bezos. They both are sitting in what looks like a hotel room, dressed in suits and laughing together.

    The crown prince of Saudi Arabia showcases elite hacking skills

    Apparently, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, sent an infected WhatsApp video to the world’s richest book store owner, Jeff Bezos. You might also know him as the big boss man of Amazon or Washington Post owner.

    After opening the seemingly innocent video, large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. This was not too long after the crown prince toured the US meeting everyone from Donald Trump to Bill Gates to Oprah and The Rock.

    Should you care? Probably not. But you should probably care about your own digital security and privacy. You can get some great tips and tricks from privacytools.io.


    An image of a security camera attached to a blank wall

    EU look to ban face-recognition technology

    According to a white-paper draft obtained by Politico, the EU are looking to ban the use of facial recognition technology in public spaces for the next five years. This would allow time for the introduction of proper regulation.

    In true Silicon Valley style, today’s facial recognition technology is not good at identifying women and people of colour and 46% of folk in the UK want to opt-out of being recognised. Another reason to have stuck with the EU membership.

    Google and Microsoft representatives have slightly different opinions on the issue. Coincidentally, Microsoft sells such technology to government agencies.


    An illustration of an office worker sat at a desk thinking about various things.

    Pause before you begin

    As we race towards the end of January, maybe it’s a good time for some reflection of the 11 months ahead. 99u have pulled together a guide based around 6 key areas of assessment based on a model published in 1976 by Dr. Bill Hettler.

    Or for a different take, try these 13 prompts for planning creative resolutions which can be used as talking points when having a word with yourself.


    Bye.

  • Links of the week

    Links of the week

    Google will give Android users a choice of browser and search engine in Europe (The Verge) — Just like Microsoft were forced to with Windows, Google will now start asking users which browser they wish to use. In part, this is a response to the €4.3 billion anti-trust fine that the EU hit Google with last year. Recently, the EU fined Google another €1.5 billion over more anti-trust misdemeanor.

    How I’m locking down my cyber-life (larrysanger.org) — Larry Sanger, Wikipedia Co-Founder, shares his plan to take control of his digital presence. It includes many broad tips and a lot less Google.

    If you want an alternative to Google search, look to Ecosia:

    Is Ecosia legit? (Our Changing Climate on YouTube) — Since I’ve mentioned the tree-planting search engine Ecosia before, I was interested in this video researching how your searches plant trees.

    When it comes to ethical alternatives:

    Fairphone (fairphone.com) — Fairphone is a modular mobile phone. When a bit of your phone breaks or needed upgrading, you can easily replace just that piece. The phones might not be as powerful as the latest Samsung Galaxy or Apple iPhones, but they’ll do most of what you need and are far more ethically and environmentally responsible.

    And a bunch of web development links that I stole from Christian Heilmann’s blog:

  • Links of the week

    Links of the week

    Guess what? Facebook still tracks you on Android apps (even if you don’t have a Facebook account) (Privacy International) — Apps like Spotify, Duolingo, Skyscanner, and Yelp all send data to Facebook from the moment they are launched. Several apps fix this, others don’t.

    Mojeek (mojeek.com) — A search engine based in the United Kingdom. They claim to not track you, have their own index of around 2.3 billion pages and aren’t based off Google, Yandex, or Bing. Terrible branding though.

    Manchester United floor PSG as Marcus Rashford’s late penalty caps comeback (The Guardian) — Last night, Manchester United knocked PSG out of the Champions League with a 3-1 victory and a last-minute penalty. It was an emotional roller coaster. Unbelievable, Jeff.

    Mastodon (joinmastodon.org) –– It’s just like Twitter, except not owned by a big company trying to make money off you. Join an existing server, or install your own – they all talk to each other to create one big network.

    How to limit which companies track your internet activity (Popular Science) — A guide to how you can optimize the settings in your web browser to be a little bit more private than when you first install it.

    Previously, previously, previously.