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Minimal web with Wiby

Nowadays the web is dominated by monolithic giants like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, that take away most of the user traffic. They tend to come with functionalities like profile creation, post making, commenting etc. This has left the average user unmotivated to go past these platforms and have his own "plot" in the digital world.

Besides the usual concerns of giving off so much power and user data to just a few select entities, I think everyone agrees that this monopoly also makes the web boring and homogenous. On top of that, even the webpages that do not fall into this category are bloated with huge amounts of advertisements and javascript eye-candy that slow down the browsing experience and tries to distract from the lack of content on them. In the past, people would create their own pages for various reasons (personal page, educational, about a hobby, etc.), have complete control over it and let their creativity shine with some HTML and CSS. In the present, such websites are quite rare and not at all easy to stumble upon with most search engines. Here is where Wiby comes in.

About Wiby

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Wiby is a search engine that indexes only webpages that are minimal in design (i.e. not much scripting and CSS) and are not of commercial nature. This filters out most of the bloat from the web and you are left with a nice landscape of websites with personality.

A fun functionality is the surprise me... button that redirects you to a random page. Most of the time it's either a personal page or one about a niche subject made by someone as a passion project. They are extremely interesting to explore and you can spend a lot of time browsing new pages that are very different from each other. Some are quite old and apparently abandoned for the last decades, but a decent amount of them are still active and serve more than just a nostalgic road trip into the past.

You can submit a page for indexing here.

Google is still going to be the best option for finding information for a specific problem, but a shift in a different direction could have great benefits.


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by Radu Mirea