6-30-17 15; 13
6-29-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Luke 12:13-20
The Hampster's New Home An article from December 2006, after DMOZ was rebuilt from their server crash 2 months earlier. Found via a link from Wikipedia. Wikipedia said DMOZ ran on 2 servers; this article's a bit more detailed. Only the editor interface ran on 2 servers; the directory, forums, search engine, and link checkers had their own servers. 23; 19
6-28-17 Google fined $2,700,000,000 by EU. 28; 25
6-27-17 Reddit Thread: Why websites should support users without JavaScript
Old-Site of the Day: SkyKing.com Official homepage of the 50's TV show. Not as old as some sites I list (it was probably made in 2004,) but an older style.
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 23:20-21
Search-Service of the Day: JoeAnt.com A directory started by former Go.com editors. Fairly well-updated and relatively spam-free, but not as extensive as DMOZ :(. Still allows free submissions, if you volunteer to edit. 33; 31
6-26-17 Old-Site of the Day: ClassicTVGits.com Started off as an unofficial NickAtNite fan page, moved to it's current home in 2001. It's layout's changed little since 2004. Looks like it went off line in 2005, but was back up in 2006. Has large archives of articles on U.S. TV Networks, TV Shows, and Actors.
Search Service of the Day: Search.SubInSB.com A search engine made by a 16-year-old kid. Good Luck!
Bible Verse of the Day: John 4:14
How have search engines changed in the past 20 years? 27; 26
6-25-17 45; 34
6-24-17 Bible Verse of the Day: 1st Peter 5:7-11
Listology had a server crash. Will report more when I have more info. Going through the Wayback Machine, it looks like the crash happened in September 2016.
Old-Site ofthe Day: Listology, in 1999. Listology was a website featuring user-created lists of the best (and worst) movies, books, and almost anything else. Not a bad layout for '99, tho I'm not a fan of pink.
Search Service of the Day: MillionShort.com Allows users to strip search results of the top million websites to see what gets burried. I remember a reviewer calling the engine stupid because it returned an old blog entry praising Twitter instead of Twitter. That misses the point. 41;39
6-23-17 Old-Site of the Day: Halfhill.com A bit of everything, with an emphasis on computers. Has an interesting article breaking down the Chinese character for computer. Still updated today.
Search Service of the Day: SurfCanyon This engine provides a browser add on to reorder search results, bringing the results which best fit your preferences to the top. Appears to have unique results.
Bible Verse of the Day: Judges 13:11-21 43;40
6-22-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Luke 6:22
Old-Site of the Day: The FreeMiNT Portal FreeMiNT was/is a Unix-like OS for Atari ST and Falcon computers. This site provides links to resources for Atari owners. Last updated in 2009, online since atleast 2001.
Search Service of the Day: Yippy.com Started as a clustering meta-search engine. I think they have their own index now, tho they do mixin results from news sites and an article search service. 51; 46
6-21-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 25:15
Old-Site of the Day: Sepc.Sony.com, in 1996. Cryptic name, isn't it? Well, don't be alarmed: This is Sony's old website for the Playstation. Looks like the Wayback machine's earliest crawl too. Dig a bit and you can find Son't official site for Crash Bandicoot. There's a link to an online Crash Game! Sadly, the game doesn't work. I wonder if anyone at Sony saved a copy, or if it's a piece of lost media...
Search Service of the Day: SecretSearchLabs.com This engine indexes at least 10 pages from each site in it's index; more if the site has more in bound links. Another lousy engine which has joined ExactSeek's ISEDN.org. Info on their ranking algorithm and on their history. 65;60
6-20-17 Sometime between last night and this morning ScrubTheWeb went offline. There's not even a good bye notice; the domain isn't even parked; it's just gone. So long Scrubby. :(
Old-Site of the Day: Surfy! Classic A link on Surfy's homepage leads to a copy of their old homepage. Lets you choose from a list of 50, most of which no longer exist, some of which I've never heard of (Brain Fox?)
Search Service of the Day: Arielis.com Another small search engine. If I remember correctly this one only indexes homepages. Returns very few results, but has a nice looking directory. I didn't know this, but they've been around since 1999.
Bible Verse of the Day: Romans 12:9-10 65;61
6-19-17 ScrubTheWeb is still up, but I'm not sure if any of their tools are still working. The search engine's been off-line for awhile now.
Old-Site of the Day: Porphyrin.net Bit concerned about linking to this one, since it's a doorway page, but I thought it was interesting anyways, if only as an example of a doorway page. Doorway pages are keyword-optimized pages which link back to a site's main page. They were used by webmasters to ensure their site ranked well for a specific keyword. Search engines have improved, and most engines considered doorway pages spam, so today doorway pages rarely used. This domain has one page which links back to related pages on it's owner's main domain, stargen.eu. I found stargen.eu when trying to research Inference Find; they have a saved search somewhere on their server. A link from the saved search led me to the doorway page, which then led me back to stargen.eu. As far as spamming techniques go this seems fairly innocent; the site really is about "porphyrins and related structures." I rel="nofollow"-ed it anyways, just to be safe. SearchKing had a few good articles on doorway pages. Here's one: Portal Partner Press: January 29, 2001 Please remember this advice is extremely dated. Following it won't help your site's search engine ranking; it may even get your site blacklisted.
Search Service of the Day: Surfy.com When I wrote my ScrubTheWeb article I forgot one other still-extant 90's search engine: Surfy.com. Not my favorite, but they do appear to have their own index, and they claim to have been online since '94.
Bible Verse of the Day: John 3:20-21 56;54
6-18-17 55;42
6-17-17 ScrubTheWeb closes tomorrow, and I've written an article about them. Here it is. Rambles a bit near the end.
Bible verse of the Day: 2 Samuel 22:40-47 David, praising God for his success, if memory serves. 68; 59
6-16-17 Sorry, no update today! 21;19
6-15-17 Just crossed 13,000 unique views today! Thank you!
Old-Site of the Day: HonestGamers.com I just found this site yesterday when checking DmozTools for broken links. I love the simple design, and there's some good content too. They've been online since 1998, and they have 9,000 video game reviews for systems ranging from the Atari 2600 to the Wii U.
Search Service of the Day: Findia.net Another service I know little about. It's owned by the same people who run the FreeFind site search engine and provides web results for that service. Appears to be a relatively old engine, dating to 1999. Requires jscript.
Well, it looks like ScrubTheWeb sold their domain name; the link to the domain marketplace it gone. I sent them one last email to say bye; don't know if I'll hear back. Probably won't, but who knows? EDIT: A quick search found the domain market place; with Scrubby's Domain still listed as for sale: Here's the for sale page. They took the description down, and lowered the minimum bid.
Bible Verse of the Day: Ruth 1:14-22 351; 159
6-14-17 I found out today that iWon is also closing their email service. (MyWay and iWon are owned by the same company.)
Old-Site of the Day: iWon.com, in 2001. iWon could be the epitome of dotcom boom crazyness. Most late 90's websites made money through ads. To make money through ads they needed users. Dotcom companies would give away free services (search results, email addresses, hosting, etc.) to attract users. What did iWon give away? Money. It was like a lotto, except you didn't have to pay to enter; you had to use their search engine. iWon even partnered with CBS, the U.S. TV network, to host a huge giveaway special. Surprisingly, it worked; iWon was successful enough to survive the dotcom bubble. The even bought up other less-successful portals, like Excite and MyWay. iWon eventually merged with AskJeeves and began useing Ask's results. Not a big loss; iWon never had their own results; they were a meta engine. iWon's portal was shut down last year, but they let their old users keep their email accounts. Even that will stop in October.
Search Service of the Day: Yioop.com. Not to be confused with Yooip, a gaming website, this is another open source search engine, developed by SeekQuarry. 1st page isn't bad, but the 2nd page seems to repeat most of the 1st page's results. And the 3rd page seems to repeat most of the 2nd page's results, and so on and so forth.
Bible Verse of the Day: Colossians 3:20-25
240;119
6-13-17 Old-Site of the Day: b-dragon.org A (Japanese?) website about bearded dragons, from 2003. Nice layout and pictures.
Search Service of the Day: Lookseek.com I don't know much about this engine, but it does offer unique results. Not too bad either, on par with Google, Yahoo, and Yandex for the term I tried. Also, I like their blinking eye logo. 8)
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 6:22-24
Tried to log into my account at MyWay and found out two things:
1) My account may be closed; I lost over 500 emails. (I hadn't accessed it in a few months; this may be my own fault.)
2) MyWay will shut down their email service in October. That bugs me because it was a nice, relatively ad-free web mail system, similar to what Excite has, but with fewer ads. (Excite, MyWay, and I believe Ask.com are owned by the same people.)
161;75
6-12-17 Old-Site of the Day: Phil's Radios I think this one's appeared on a few other old website lists. It's a large database of old radios and TV's. It started in 1995 and appears to sill be updated today. Cudos to Phil for keeping it up! I do have one worry; would Europe's Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive ban sales of old electronics, like these radios and TV's, or even older computers and game systems? I'm not against attempts to make the world safer, but I don't want beautiful equipment junked.
Search Service of the Day: YaCy. One of the more viable sounding open source search projects. The engine's distributed; if someone think's the project's worthwhile they can run a peice of it on their own server. A good idea, but it only returns titles and URLs, which makes it hard to judge relevance at-a-glance. If you like the engine, YaCy reccomends downloading and running a piece of the engine yourself.
Ephesians 4:20-30
170; 85
6-11-17 27; 14
6-10-17 Old-Site of the Day: The Quciksand Page Yes, an entire site about quicksand. Contains facts, fiction, and a collection of screencaps from movies which contain quicksand.
Bible Verse of the Day: Revelation 2:7
Search Service of the Day: Wotbox.com A nice-looking search engine which lists a website's hosting country, and allows users to filter results by country. Not the most relevant results, however. Looks like it used to be named Wotbot.
24;23
6-9-17 Alright, I've done a bit more research into SFF.net. It was not you're standard fansite; rather it was a community for sci-fi and fantasy writers. It hosted sites, email accounts, and had it's own usenet newsserver(!) All of these were shut down on March 31. Here's the Internet Archive's last working crawl of SFF.net, from March 18. Look closely, and you'll see a tiny link to their closing notice.
Old-Site of the Day: SFF.net, in 1996. Here's what they looked like pretty soon after they opened.
Bible Verse of the Day: 1 Timothy 6:20
Search Service of the Day: Yandex.com Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia; this is their Engilsh version.
24;23
6-8-17 TheOldRobots.com Not an old-site of the day, it's from 2007, but still cool. Who doesn't love robots?
Bible Verse of the Day: Acts 16:30-33
Search Service of the Day: Apexoo.com
Another small search engine which only indexes the front page of websites. Not bad for general topics, tho it usually only returns 50 sites.
Old-Site of the Day: Claymont.com, in 1998. A teeny search engine fron the 90's. Actually stayed online til last year. There's a message on their homepage noting that they're planning a relaunch. When's anyone's guess.Here's a later version, from 2000, with more info on the engine. And here's even later version, from 2004. They were trying to sell SEO advise in that last version, similar to ScrubTheWeb. :(
SFF.net has shut down. It was large Sci-Fi fan site, from 1996. Apparently couldn't support itself anymore. I'll try to post more on it when I have more time.
49;46
6-7-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 90.
Search Service of the Day: iSeek.ai Yesterday, when entering iSeek's address, I found myself at a different site, this site. They're owned by the same poeple; this is a more modern version of the search page I linked to yesterday. More about iSeek. Sounds like they're trying to market their search engine as an analytics tool.
Old-Site of the Day: Chew's Pokemon Splat An old Pokemon fansite. Fairly well-developed, with pre-release info on Ruby and Sapphire.
35;32
6-6-17 Bible Verse of the Day: 2 Peter 1:3
Google Raters Ars Tech article on the contractors Google uses to rate websites. No, it's not all AI; there are still real people involved.
Old-Site of the Day: SearchEngineSnob Reviews of Search Engines from the turn of the century. No major players, largely negative.
Search Service of the Day: iSeek.com. Good clustering engine. Combines their own results with Google's resuls and sorts them into catagories.
31;29
6-5-17 Old-Site of the Day: VideoGameObsession.com A 20+ year old video game site featuring pictures of a man's collection of systems, games, ads, and magazines. Still updated. There used to be hundreds of sites like this, but now they've either gone off line or are impossible to find. (Too few backlinks to appear in Google's search results, unless you've already visited the site or are looking for something very specific.)
Search Service of the Day: AllTheInternet.com. Another webportal created by linking other sites together. They'll let you run searches from Google, Bing, Gigablast, DuckDuckGo, various ECom sites, and what appears to be their own index. At the very least they offer unique results. Results aren't too bad either.
Bible Verse of the Day: John: 3:19-21 24;23
6-4-17 44; 31
6-3-17 Old-Site of the Day: Luigi Cozzi Interview Luigi Cozzi directed Starcrash and other funky Sci-Fi fantasy movies in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. This is an interview with him from 2000.
Search Service of the Day: Entireweb.com Bought EuroSeek's search engine when EuroSeek went bankrupt. Slow, but with nice features and relevant results. Results include a snapshot of the site. Still, you may not want to give them money.
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 14:224;22
6-2-17 Sorry for not updating. 16; 16
6-1-17 Happy June Everyone!
FireFox's Market Share's Declining. Bit sad; I usually use FireFox to update this site. I bet that has to do with moblie; Android is the most popular mobile OS, & since Google owns Android most mobile users probably use Chrome. There was (is?) an attempt to make a Firefox OS for tablets, phones, and the like, but I know of no phones which use it. You need apps to get people intered in an OS, and you need either millions of dollars or millions of users to get most developers interested in developing those aps. :/
Bible verse of the Day: Matthew 5:14-16
Search Service of the Day: FactBites.com An interesting little search engine. Returns collections of facts from articles their algorithms determine are well-written, with a link to the article if it's still online. Few/no advanced search featurtes, only one page of results, small index, but good search results.
Old-Site of the Day: Mindy's Lizard Zoo. An archived GeoCities site about lizards. Front page has a cartoon PC with lizards crawling on it.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 36; Unique: 35