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Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#2
Google used to let you blacklist websites many moons ago, that would go a long way already.

Now there are a few extensions that do that, but obviously they only hide the results from each page, so sometimes you will see pages with 2 results, if any at all.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#4
This is a great question, I also want a way to search the internet but exclude all major media domains as well as any company over a certain size. So I just want to search through old blogs, SO, non-corporate social media, weird forums, etc.

There are so many cool things I remember reading on the web like 10-20 years ago that still exist that are so buried now on Google they might as well not exist. Nowadays searching any topic seems to always lead you to CNN and Microsoft and Facebook and other huge corporations. Search results are just becoming more sanitized and beige and meaningless every day.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#9
post #3

There is a search engine with this exact goal: https://millionshort.com/ . I haven't had that great results with it myself though.

I tried it with "waders" which are either the things that you to put on your feet to go fishing or a category of birds (shorebirds or herons). The results after going for all the options were still exclusively stores wanting to sell me the former.

Garbage in, garbage out. I guess. Still I like the idea of something to side-step the SEO perhaps with more effort they can make it work but relying on Google or any major search engine for the base results is the wrong way to go.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#10
post #7

https://wiby.me/ exists to solve this exact problem. I've found some pretty neat/odd websites on it in the past.

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.

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