What is Wiby?
Wiby (wiby.me) is a free search engine website that has its own index that can only find small, hobbyist websites (i.e. the indie web).
Notable Features
Small web search: unlike most search engines, Wiby doesn't provide general purpose web search. Instead, it only indexes small, lightweight websites, which means no or very few ads, which means mainly non-commercial websites, which means mainly hobbyist websites. Thus, you won't even need to block Pinterest in Wiby, because Wiby doesn't index Pitnerest to begin with. Wiby also doesn't index Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, Quora, StackOverflow, etc. None of the largest websites are indexed by Wiby, not even Medium, and Wiby also doesn't index shopping websites, so the only websites you can find on Wiby are truly the websites you would never find on Google because they would be buried under thousands and thousands of results from the big ones.
For example, you can find results from Neocities on Wiby, a website that lets anyone create their own website with pure HTML for free.
This all means that Wiby can't really replace, and isn't supposed to be a replacement, for Google. Wiby is a specialized search engine that can find some very interesting stuff made by people around the web, but it can't really do much beyond that.
Ad-free: Wiby has no ads and operates on a donation model. Since Wiby isn't a general-purpose search engine, and it doesn't even provide image search, very few people use it, or even know about its existence, so the costs for running Wiby are probably very low compared to the costs of a well-known search engine that people use for everything.
Open source: Wiby is libre software licensed under GPLv21. If you ever wanted an open source search engine to study how to make your own search engine, there you go, this is it: github.com/wibyweb/wiby/. It uses PHP or Go for the core server, and MySQL for the database.
References
- https://wiby.me/about/ (2024-05-01) ↩︎
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