Show HN: Gulugulu, an old-style client-side search engine for the old weird web

2 points

13 hours ago

story

A few days ago, I was looking for some obscure dev blogs and websites, and realized how completely useless normal search engines have become for finding "weird" content. Unless you already know the exact URL, almost every query just leads to SEO-optimized, commercial websites or AI-slop.

So I built Gulugulu to fix this for myself. It's a search engine that only indexes the old/weird web like digital gardens, Neocities pages, ASCII art, and personal projects.

There is no backend. It's a static site hosted on GitHub Pages.

You can try it here: https://cbrincoveanu.github.io/gulugulu/

The search runs entirely in your browser using Fuse.js against a single, flat index.json file. To get the data, I wrote a Python crawler that specifically scrapes curated indie webrings (like 512kb.club and Cloudhiker), extracts the basic metadata, and dumps it into the JSON array. Because it's completely serverless, there are zero analytics, no ads, and no cookie banners.

Obviously, loading a massive JSON file into browser memory has a hard upper limit. Right now, the index is small enough that client-side search feels instant. To scale it without melting mobile browsers, I'm working on a deeper crawler (depth=2) that runs URLs through an LLM to score their quality. If a site looks like commercial spam, it gets dropped before appending to the json.

I'd love feedback on the client-side Fuse.js performance. Also, the index is still pretty small. If you have a personal blog, a digital garden, or know any weird RSS feeds, please drop them in the comments and I'll add them to the crawler's seed list!