Let's Talk About Clew
When I first started using the Internet, Internet search engines were a new invention. Most of them sucked. Google was still years off. The way I found other people’s sites was through word of mouth. I knew someone who knew someone else who found kevq.uk and thought it was really cool. I don’t advocate going back to a time when there were no search engines. Of course not. Search engines have real functionality beyond feeding all of us ads and scraping everything about us for sale or to train some LLM. We just need to get back to a time when search engines were actually useful, and not just ad machines.
So, this is where I talk about Clew. For those of you who don’t know what Clew is, Clew is an independent search engine and the brain child of Amin Hollon. I’m going to just flat out plagiarize the rest of this right off their page. “Clew is a web search engine trying to be different from the rest.” They “focus on writing by independent creators. There’s no point in indexing Wikipedia; it has its own perfectly serviceable search bar.”
The fact that they focus on independent creators is important. These are just people. They’re not necessarily journalists or “influencers”. They don’t need to be for some of these people to have real and helpful knowledge. Knowledge they’re willing to share without making you turn off your ad blocker to make sure they’re able to sell you deodorant before you learn about neovim. I think this is important, and worth supporting.
Clew also is dedicated to sustainability. With that in mind, when you search using Clew, the results are given a grade based on how sustainable they are. According to Clew, “To accomplish this, we’ve used datasets and guidelines from the Green Web Foundation and Sustainable Web Design to estimate the sustainability impact of webpages on a scale from A+ to F.” It puts a smile on my face to see an A+ next to results from this site.
Now, caveat. Clew is in beta. It only has an index of 223,778 pages. That’s not going to include every great page. It’s not going to include every mediocre page. Despite that, I like it and I’ve even added it to my search engines in Vivaldi. I click my address bar and just type my search query with a “c” in front of it, and Clew shows me all sorts of interesting things written by independent creators.
I love that.
Day 4 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.
Looking for comments? There are no comments. It's not that I don't care what you think, it's just that I don't want to manage a comments section.
If you want to comment, there's a really good chance I at least mentioned this post on Fosstodon, and you can reply to me there. If you don't have a Mastodon account, I'd suggest giving it a try.
If you don't want to join Mastodon, and you still want to comment, feel free to use my contact information.
Also, don't feel obligated, but if you feel like buying me a ☕ cup of coffee ☕ I won't say no.