3 ms·

holy crap, thanks for sharing Wiby! For the past two weeks I have been trying to find an old website by searching for "old mysterious site search engines" and

• gwern 8y ago
  I'm surprised you had trouble finding Fravia. When I was writing my own Internet search guide ( https://www.gwern.net/Search https://www.gwern.net/Search ) recently, I had no trouble finding Fravia. Unfortunately, his guide is obsolete at this point and I didn't get much out of it.
  • typon 8y ago
    my favorite part about search lores wasn't the actual tips on how to google, but his writing style and the mysterious, almost occult feeling i got from visiting that website, with latin phrases and history strewn everywhere. Thanks for your guide though, ill chek it out :)
  • kickscondor 8y ago
    Thankyou for the link to your search guide - this looks tremendous! Especially when searching for a specific answer to something. I wonder what you think about discovery when you are looking for something unknown within certain parameters... Like, say you are looking for an "interesting film blog" - a search term like that will often lead to pages of "Top 10 Movie Blogs" lists that are all largely clickbait or not that interesting. Do you have any advice for that kind of search? (Perhaps you cover this in the guide, but I missed it in my scan - I thought I would ask while you are here.)
    • fiter 8y ago
      It looks like Gwern's guide is for finding something which you know already exists, rather than looking for something which may not.
    • yorwba 8y ago
      I'm no gwern, but here's how I do discovery. To find a page on the internet, you need to hand a search engine something that can be reasonably expected to be on that page. So if you want to find an interesting film blog, you should not use that as a search term, because you'll find lists of blogs, not the blogs themselves. Rather, you should probably use the titles of interesting movies. There are many ways you could seed that search, but as totally-not-a-movie-buff I decided to check IMDb's list of lowest rated movies [1] and chose a title further down the list (The Wicker Man), on the theory that only dedicated people would be talking about movies that are bad, but not bad enough to be the worst. Searching for blogs (as identified by inurl:blog) mentioning "The Wicker Man" [2] does turn up a few promising results, like [3]. [1] https://m.imdb.com/chart/bottom https://m.imdb.com/chart/bottom [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=inurl%3Ablog+%22The+Wicker+Man%22 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=inurl%3Ablog+%22The+Wicker+Man%22 [3] https://blog.vrv.co/kaiser/4826/the-wicker-man-was-almost-lost-to-history/ https://blog.vrv.co/kaiser/4826/the-wicker-man-was-almost-lo...
      • kickscondor 8y ago
        This is good advice - thankyou! I have definitely used this kind of approach before, it requires some creativity. It feels like there are possibly dozens of ways of approaching this - and obviously unlimited kinds of 'seeds' (as you say) for the search. I'm definitely looking for a guide that might encompass this kind of strategy.
• irrational 8y ago
  I just did a Surprise Me! search on Wiby. This is what it came back with ;-) http://www.zackssnakes.50megs.com/index.html http://www.zackssnakes.50megs.com/index.html