Welcome to the web shufflr website

Many websites today are designed for clicks and engagement, not people. Websites use clickbait, algorithms, and AI-generated spam to increase visibility at a cost of usability. Search engines are a mess, and social media is overrun with bots. The dead internet theory feels pretty real.

We miss the Web 2.0 [video] days. Back then, websites were fun, simple, and created for the people, not for metrics. So we created web shufflr, which aims to rediscover websites that fit into the web 1.0 and 2.0 era.

We dig through crawl data from the 2010s and earlier using repositories like archive.org to look for vintage URLs. These URLs are re-crawled to see what survived, and extract the main text and then sorted into categories using an automated system. So far we have over 500,000 websites in our archive where the vast majority of these sites are generally unexciting such as businesses, services, and news. There's a ton of blogs, and then there's a very small number of truly interesting and informative websites that can be hard to find today.

The end result is an index of modern and vintage websites sorted into over 100 topics that visitors may find interesting. There are broad mainstream topics like movies, travel, politics, and science, and more niche topics like comics, 1980s, vintage, handmade, and biography. The website is in its infancy, we are continually adding websites, adding topics, and refining the categorization algorithm with the goal of making a StumbleUpon-like experience to find fun and interesting websites. Stay tuned for more...