I’ve been having nostalgic fun playing with the wiby search engine’s surprise me… button. It takes me to a random page indexed by the engine, which means a random home made webpage unmarked by corporate malaise.
But, boy, so many are dated. There’s classic 1990s garish flashing drivel, there’s pages that haven’t noticed the arrival of the mobile phone, and there’s a surprising number of very dated yet still maintained pages. If you ever have the ambition to be an anorak of an obscure subject, but you’re not sure which, browse those surprise me… pages for inspiration.
For a taster, I’ve just rolled the goat to find small community pages (squiggle city), obscure histories (project xanadu), old but still very funny nonsense (computerising your old land rover, you must absolutely try this), odd collections (The Album Cover Art Gallery), stuff that appeals to me (bad human factor design), fascinating archives (the food timeline), specialist subjects (how to repair a trombone slide), ….
You know something? Sites like wiby make the internet interesting again. Instead of the same old echo chamber curated by personal information pirates such as faceboot, wiby throws up sometimes fascination, often interesting, frequently appalling, stuff to explore.
It’s not the only interesting site search engine either.