After publishing this website a few days ago, I started on my trek to the wild west of the web with one goal in mind. To find cool websites owned by individuals and small relatively unknown orgs. So, sitting down with my iced tea to my right, and a fresh Firefox tab opened, I placed my fingers on the keyboard. And…. Nothing. I haven’t even typed a single letter into the browser, and I was stuck already. It suddenly dawned on me that I created this website without a shred of thought about how I would go looking for these small-web websites. It’s not like these websites would just present themselves before me and say, “Click me, I’m cool, I’m interesting!”. No, this wasn’t something I could just spend a few minutes on, pack it up into a nice blog post, and ship it out for the world to see. I needed a plan, and a way to find these sites reliably.

Initially, I made a list. A few general topics I could keep with me at a moment’s notice to research and see if I could find websites pertaining to them. From here, I overcame my first hurdle, knowing what to search . There was still another issue though. What is my definition of a small-web website? The first question could be answered simply by referring to Ben Hoyt’s article on the small-web . His article does a great job explaining what encompasses it, and if you have time to read it, I absolutely recommend it. Still, I needed to set some standards for which websites I would list on this site. As such, I came up with 3 rules for listing sites on here.

The first rule – no ads (kind of)

The first rule I decided on comes mostly out of necessity. When browsing the web today, it quickly becomes apparent how grossly the internet has become consumed by ads. On one hand I get it. Hosting websites and publishing free content canbe expensive, and when putting out free content is your business, it’s hard not to look to ad space as being a viable channel for income. However, these ad spaces are invasive, and often are managed by third party companies i.e. google, amazon, et cetera. The problem with these ad providers becomes even more apparent when half of the ads served to you aren’t even legitimate, but scams, phishing campaigns, and malware. You know it’s bad when even high-level government organizations are telling people that they need an ad-blocker to surf the internet.

As such, that is my first rule, no ads. Specifically, no 3rd-party ads. You shouldn’t need an adblocker just to surf the web. First party ads that litter a page or significantly impact the content being displayed will also be disqualified. If you are displaying ads on a website, they should not serve to be a hinderance to the visitor .

The second rule – no trackers

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way are trackers / invasive analytic scripts. No, you don’t need to record my mouse movement, and you absolutely do not need to be sending my data to large corporations. I don’t want a digital profile of my life stored on someone else’s computer and sold to businesses. What I do in my own time is not your business without my written/verbal consent. Thus, the second rule, I will not list websites that use invasive trackers/analytics.

The third rule – no businesses

I’m not against some businesses, but often, businesses on the web will write one-off articles of different topics in order to generate more traffic to their website. And the main purpose of those articles is to redirect you to their service where the main goal is to sell you something. I find this generally distasteful and will not list websites that employ these tactics. Exceptions to this rule comes in the form of small personal hobby sites, where much of the content is not focused on selling you a product or service. Rather giving you a showcase of what they have made with the option to purchase after you have been informed of the alternatives.

Actually searching for small-web websites

Now that I have established the baseline for what kind of websites I’ll be looking for, I was ready to search. At least that’s what I thought. My first search was going to be for a website that focuses of reptiles, specifically snakes. But upon searching, all I could find were large websites owned by businesses and news organizations. Every time I went to click on the next page indexing websites on the topic, it turned out to be the same exact results, often the same businesses, same news stations, and same large and somewhat controversial organizations. This was disheartening, essentially these search engines just resulted in one, large echo chamber , recycling the same exact content in a boring, almost monotone way.

I decided from here on out I’d have to get clever, look for old forums, online discussions, info-dumps, and other niche platforms for the possibility of a link that may just lead to the pot of gold I was looking for. It’s not as if the search engines made it easy to find these types of sites. But with a lot of searching, and a little luck, I eventually found the very first website I wanted to list and write about. At this point I felt that I had a solid plan to find these websites in a relatively time-efficient manner. And now that I had my very first website to write about, I felt confident that I could repeat this process and come up with decent content to post on this site.

If anything, making this website has just made me realize how difficult it is to locate the small-web, and how counter-intuitive it is to my modern browsing habits. Tracking down these small-web websites is truly a difficult task that does not go without time dedication and a firm grounding of the ideals presented by what the small-web is. The small-web is truly a hidden gem. And as I attempt to unearth this gem, I am finding more vibrancy, life, and community than I ever have on the corporate-owned, big web.

Until next time, thanks for reading.