The indieweb need a search engine

Follow me, if you will, on a journey. This is largely a brain dump but there’s a point and an idea in here somewhere.. I think.

This whole thing started with a post by Cassidy Williams.

She talks about how everyone metaphorically disappeared from the internet post-“social media™”. Personal blogs and websites became harder to come by and human curation was replaced by algorithms and this “For You” page nonsense.

When I say “I don’t know where everyone went,” I know everyone’s out there surfing the web, of course, but it feels like it’s a different place now. When the algorithms are determining everything we should be seeing, it’s a much less personal internet.

It’s a great read, please check it out.

It got me thinking (and posting):

Can we just make a new indieweb search engine that uses tags and requires people submit their own site to be a part of it? Literally just make a page with a search bar and type in whatever kind of blog/site you’re looking for. Ship it.

The replies came in and they pointed to examples of this or variations of it anyway. Matt Stein even shared a link to an article that had a list of them.

Some of these sort of archive what I had initially imagined but they’re overwhelming in a lot of ways too. Landing in a page of thumbnails, links, or tags isn’t the most user friendly. There’s also no source of truth to all of it, no standout example for others to follow. It’s potentially hundreds (or thousands?) of sites spread across dozens of lists.

So I return to my original question: could we not create a single engine that these sorts of websites could hook into with a focused, minimal, user-friendly design akin to early (useful) Google? Could it federate? What about ActivityPub? Is there a scalable way to retain the human curation of it?

I don’t have answers to these questions. My hope is that maybe something like this prompts a discussion about it. Chris McLeod shared a post of his along the same lines from a few years ago. We can’t be the only ones thinking of this, right?

Several people have pointed me towards searchmysite.net, which is almost exactly what I had in mind. I ran a couple searches and found some really interesting sites already. I’m excited to dig into it more.