I found this old-school style search engine recently and have been toying with it every now and then. Its focus is on indexing the weird/fascinating “classic” style of webpages with lower-spec HTML, as opposed to the very commercial pages that flood the most-used search engines of today. For example, when you search “pokemon”, you get a lot of GeoCities-era stuff as well as some newer indie web sorta things.
As per the About page:
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today’s web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.