Wiby: A Search Engine for the Handmade Web

Wiby is a search engine for the web that Google forgot. It indexes small, lightweight, mostly hand-coded pages, personal sites, hobby pages, plain HTML documents written by one person about one thing. Type a query and you get results that feel like 1999 in the best possible way. Or skip typing entirely and hit “surprise me.”

What is Wiby?

Modern search is very good at finding you a product. It is terrible at finding you a person.

Search anything today and you get the same shape of result: a listicle, an ad-heavy guide, a page engineered by a content team to rank. Somewhere underneath all that, the actual web still exists, someone’s page about restoring vacuum tube radios, a retired professor’s notes on medieval bread, a fan site for a canceled show that has been running since 2003.

Wiby indexes that layer. Deliberately, and almost exclusively.

The index is small by design and skews heavily toward pages that load in a blink: minimal styling, little or no JavaScript, no trackers, no cookie wall, no newsletter popup ambushing you at the 30% scroll mark. Just text and links, which is what the web was invented to be.

The result is a search engine that is worse at answering questions and dramatically better at showing you something you did not know existed.

What can you do on Wiby?

• Search normally. Type a topic. The results page is plain, fast, and free of ads. Try a hobby: “shortwave,” “orchids,” “typewriters”, and watch what comes back.
• Hit the surprise button. One click, one random page from the index. This is the main event and everyone knows it. Keep clicking. You will land on things nobody has linked to in fifteen years.
• Browse the “about” and community pages. Wiby explains its own philosophy plainly, and it is worth reading: the project has opinions about what the web should feel like.
• Submit a site. Found a great little page? Suggest it. Built one yourself? Suggest that too. Submissions get reviewed by a human.
• Use it as a research back door. For old technical topics, obscure crafts, and pre-2005 subcultures, Wiby genuinely finds material that mainstream search buries.

Tips to get the most out of it

Use single, concrete nouns. Wiby’s index is small, so long natural-language questions return nothing. “How do I care for a bonsai tree in winter” gets you silence. “Bonsai” gets you a treasure chest.

Treat the surprise button as the product. Search is the feature; random is the experience. Set yourself a rule, ten clicks, no skipping, and read whatever comes up. It is the closest thing to genuine internet serendipity still available.

Search hobbies, not topics. Wiby’s index rewards enthusiasm. Astronomy, ham radio, model trains, mycology, vintage computing, knots, birds. Anything someone would build a personal shrine to.

Bookmark what you find immediately. These pages are fragile. Many are on hosting that could evaporate. If something delights you, save it, or better, save it to the Wayback Machine.

Try it when you are stuck. When mainstream search gives you nothing but SEO sludge for a niche question, Wiby is a genuinely useful second opinion. Not always. But often enough to keep in the rotation.

If you like Wiby, also try…

• Kagi Small Web: the same instinct, aimed at the present. A live feed of posts from independent blogs, no algorithm involved.
• Cameron’s World: the visual version of this nostalgia, built from salvaged GeoCities graphics.
• Internet Archive / Wayback Machine: where the pages Wiby loves go when they die.
• The Useless Web: random-button energy, dialed to pure nonsense.

More oddities live in Weird & Wonderful, and the practical stuff is over in Tools & Utilities.