Best way to find/explore old/obscure websites?

[Bakartridge]

The subject line kinda says it, I wanna find a good way to find older websites or just obscure stuff in general. I always like going on the wayback machine and exploring older websites (usually Newgrounds or game sites, it's pretty easy to splinter off and explore some random stuff just from there), though just having something to use where I can find cool and interesting stuff around the current internet is cool too, the closest thing I can think of is Cloudhiker, I found some pretty interesting sites using that, though I'm curious as if there's anything else like it.



...i miss stumbleupon.

[Slix]

I've used Marginalia Search in the last year or so to find smaller, older-style websites: https://marginalia-search.com/

They have a custom search engine focused on smaller sites, an Explore feature to find new ones by looking at thumbnails of them, and you can browse by similar sites as well! I believe this is how I found MelonLand, haha.

[brisray]

There's several ways of finding interesting sites. For newer "old-web" sites you can follow any webrings they belong to. For a mixture of old and new sites you can use the personal directories people have set up or use a specialized search engine.

[dotmidi]

I really enjoy websurfing off of restorativland. It definitely captures the essence of old geocities culture and dead communities that even Neocities has failed to revitalize! (The roleplay groups in the anime community have piqued my attention, and I hope to see someone build a roleplay group on Neocities if it hasn't already been done.)
The WeHo (West Hollywood) neighborhood is also great for a glimpse of gay history in the 1990s; it's mostly trans women's personal webpages, which are intriguing to click through and see what these ladies were wearing at the time.

 Gifcities is also super fun if you want to look up a super specific gif and find its origin.
Here's a rare gem I've kept, I think it might be one of my favorites.

[milo]

The MelonLand Surf Club is always a blast to browse of course!

Every once in a while I hit up JAUP and just start clicking.

Ytoo is a pretty neat recreation of browsing the Internet via the Yahoo home page, which was, in my case, the family computer's browser homepage back in the day.

[grave]

I've been collecting sites like that, I'll link some here:

• Ytoo
• Diagram Website
• Marginalia Search
• CloudHiker

But I've also had a lot of success just following people's webrings, and linked sites!

[tanuki]

I've used Marginalia Search in the last year or so to find smaller, older-style websites: https://marginalia-search.com/

They have a custom search engine focused on smaller sites, an Explore feature to find new ones by looking at thumbnails of them, and you can browse by similar sites as well! I believe this is how I found MelonLand, haha.

I've been collecting sites like that, I'll link some here:

• Ytoo
• Diagram Website
• Marginalia Search
• CloudHiker

But I've also had a lot of success just following people's webrings, and linked sites!

Seconding both Marginalia Search & Ytoo. I currently have Ytoo set as my homepage, it's a nice little throwback with lots of links to different sites in this little old-web / web-revival sphere.

A personal favourite of mine however is wiby.me which is another search engine, but has a 'surprise me' functionality to take you to a random site. I can spend well over an hour going to these random sites and following links from those pages.

As others mentioned, webrings are also a great way to find sites of similar styles/content

[Darmodej]

my pal blackle runs a thing that's like a repeater station for rss blogs of its friends from cohost