I am highlighting two search engines that are indexing the only Indie Web and/or Indieweb pages (please see below for my definitions of these terms.)  Each search engine is different from each other so I’m going to highlight both their similarities and differences.

Similarities

Both engines allow submissions of URL’s for inclusion.

Both engines are human reviewed at submission.  This is a good thing, because a human editor can fiter out spam and websites that just don’t belong better than any algorithm.

Both will recrawl at unknown intervals for changes and to detect dead URL’s.

Both crawl for onpage text and maybe meta tags.  I’m guessing here but this seems likely.  Therefore, they may not do so well indexing pages that are mainly, photos, artwork or images with very little text.

Both discover new pages/websites only by submissions and by URL’s added to the index that the human editor might add manually.  So neither has a general crawler that just keeps following hyperlinks like a general search engine crawler.

Both have a nice “Random” result link which is a handy and fun starting point to surf the web.

Differences

Wiby.me – Wiby is designed to index Indie Web (aka Independent Web) pages, like the old non-commercial HTML static pages of the 1990’s and early 2000’s.  It does not spider a whole website.  It only crawls the unique URL submitted.  So only one page.  Because of that it is not really designed to crawl non-commercial blogs.  Wiby’s suggestion for blog webmasters is to submit one or two really good posts if you want to be in the index.  Because it actually crawls onpage text this makes Wiby more sophisticated than a web directory like Indieseek.xyz and gives it a better search function.

Searchmysite.net – Searchmysite is designed to crawl deeper (maybe 50 pages or permalinks) within a single domain. (I don’t know how it treats subdomains.)  This makes it better at indexing Indieweb blogs and indeed, as I write this, most of Searchmysite’s index appears to be Indieweb blogs.  I cannot speak for the editor but I don’t see why Searchmysite would not also accept and crawl static HTML websites (ie. Retro or vintage HTML sites) so long as the site has some value and content that it can index, but they might not.  Again, this is going to be mainly text.  If you are looking for non-commercial blogs Searchmysite is the better option to start with.

Future of Indie Search

I’m highlighting these two niche search engines because in their own ways, they represent the future of Indie Web search.  I’d like to see many more of them.  Directories, like Indieseek.xyz, have their place, but being able to collect and search by,  actual on-page content goes far beyond what a traditional directory is capable of doing.  These guys could put me out of business and I’d be just fine with that!

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