Ancient Web: Wiby Taught Searchers to Find Small Handmade Pages Again

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A search engine promising the old Web has an unusual teaching aid: a small page about an Apollo spacecraft shaking hands with a Soyuz.

Visit Wiby's help page.

The page is headed “Apollo - Soyuz Test Project,” with two spacecraft pictures, a handful of unrelated links and one final explanation of why such an ordinary document matters. It says nearly anyone can build a personal website by writing an index.html file, and encourages visitors to inspect the source rather than purchase a visual website builder. This is not evidence that Wiby dates to the Apollo era or even to the 1990s. It is a deliberate demonstration of the older Web's approachable publishing style.

A search engine with an editorial preference

The Wiby homepage is similarly restrained: a search field, a surprise-me link, settings and an invitation to submit a page. Its About explanation argues that commercial pages and heavy scripting have crowded individual hobbyists out of the everyday search experience. Wiby's remedy is not to index everything equally, but to concentrate on small sites that resemble the Web's earlier personal and academic culture.

That preference becomes concrete on the submission page. Wiby favors simple HTML and noncommercial pages, discourages intrusive advertising and excessive scripts, and says it will usually crawl only the submitted page. It asks contributors not to submit dozens of pages from the same person's site. An Angelfire or Tripod address is no automatic pass when the host's advertisements overwhelm the content.

The project's technical decisions follow the same philosophy. Its About page says that very old browsers are not automatically forced onto HTTPS, offers JSON search output for developers and links to source code available under GPLv2. It also mentions an occasionally operating HTTP chat service intended for ancient machines.

A modern search index built to discover old-looking pages is not itself an ancient website. Wiby's value to this series is that it makes an explicit preservation argument and adapts a search tool to old hardware and independent creators, rather than preserving an old interface as decoration.

Its Apollo-Soyuz example closes the loop. The spacecraft captions are interesting, but the larger lesson is that a handful of links and images can still constitute a useful, personally authored webpage.

Read Wiby's explanation of what belongs in its index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.