💾 Archived View for gem.keazilla.net › glog › 2021-07-27-tales_from_smolnet.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:42:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
An entry written for facebook, but also recorded here.
The "you probably don't have a gemini browser" bit is intended as a FOMO hook for some readers 😉, but AFAIK Marginalia.nu really does only have the Astrolabe writings on gemini.
gemini://marginalia.nu/topic/astrolabe.gmi
∽──────────────∽
What if the old web never disappeared, what if it disappeared from view with the advent of Google and the tech-giants — due to the lenses we now all use to find web pages. Perhaps if you could refocus the lens you could see it again, or even see a different parallel universe.
What if you had the power to change what kind of pages are visible in search results...
All this was the theory of someone from Sweden, who has invented a new home hobby: Build and operate an internet search engine.
As a hobby it's pretty wild¹, I want to do this myself now, but there's a moratorium on new hobbies.
You can use the search engine here https://search.marginalia.nu/
Conventional search engines all use flavours of PageRank, returning the most popular or official-ish links, which you never see beyond.
❝If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you're on the right track.❞
The About page does a better description than me, and there's behind-the-scenes details in their blog in geminispace (though you probably don't have a gemini browser).
❝People put lists of very specific URLs they do not want you to look at in robots.txt, and I don't specifically mean secret admin log-in pages (even though that happens too), but like embarrassing stuff, dirt, the awkward august 2003 issue of campus magazine when the dean awarded Kony philanthropist of the year. It keeps the search engines out, but human beings can read these files too.❞ 😂
¹more wild than model trains
∽──────────────∽