Yahoo Search works with Links Web Browser:
https://search.yahoo.com

Hi, a few sites I know..

//FrogFind//
Search engine for old browsers
http://www.frogfind.com/
http://frogfind.de/

//Wiby//
Search engine for classic websites (no Java etc)
http://wiby.me
http://wiby.org

//Wayback Classic//
Frontend for Wayback Machine for old browsers
https://wayback-classic.net/

https://search.aol.com/
works in Opera 12, without JS, including the image search

Thanks for responses. I tested each and this is what I found:

- search.aol.com redirects to search.yahoo.com

- frogfind works everywhere, but it shows the results as text only, something like a RSS feed. It isn't possible to actually look at a page correctly.

- wiby only shows results for things it already knows about. If you type in something else, it finds nothing. For example, it finds "news", but not "latest news". The search results are questionable, as it seems to use a very old search database. But given all that, it does kinda work.

- yahoo was the best bet, but it doesn't work on all browsers, for example no IE6. On win98 it does work on Firefox and Opera.

- On my win98, I can't update the certificate store because it says it's read-only or full. No idea how to fix this. Therefore it isn't possible to try anything for IE6.

I'll try more things and see what happens.

IE6 has been broken a very very long time.
I always reverted to IE5/5.5 or Firefox beta .8/.9 as more would work to some extent which was strange.

Robbbert wrote:

So in other words, if you use an old machine, google is NO LONGER your friend.

Yes I think its because they cant track us using older stuff so they dont want us there..

I have found a way around it by changing my UA to something other than MSIE 6.0 .. Interestingly "MSIE6.0" works! (No space)

Its the "enable scripts" that makes it not work.. The scripts are not compat with our older browsers 😀

Dude111 wrote on 2025-12-06, 10:09:

Yes I think its because they cant track us using older stuff so they dont want us there.. […]
Show full quote

Robbbert wrote:

So in other words, if you use an old machine, google is NO LONGER your friend.

Yes I think its because they cant track us using older stuff so they dont want us there..

I have found a way around it by changing my UA to something other than MSIE 6.0 .. Interestingly "MSIE6.0" works! (No space)

Its the "enable scripts" that makes it not work.. The scripts are not compat wth our older browsers 😀

On my G4 Mac running OS X 10.4 Tiger, I can reach Google with Internet Explorer 5.x.
The Mac version had an browser engine different from Trident (it used Tasman).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

@Robbbert Wiby is meant to find oldschool websites, I think.
Not obsolete websites, but all websites of any year that are made like old/traditional websites.
This also includes websites from, say, the 2010s or 2020s if they were made like in the good old day.

I occasionally use that search engine to find HTML 2 compatible websites for vintage browsers such as Minuet (1994) or obscure Windows 3.x browsers (Mosaic, Cello)..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser

Another retro site is http://retroreddit.com/ which is a front-end to reddit website.
It even works with a 1994 era web browser. It's fun to read stuff on Lynx or a VT100 terminal, for example.
Or for browsing the internet on a text-browser on the console via CoolRetroTerm.

On my windows 7 machine today, so experimentation limited to IE11.

Found that Bing works fine, although if you type quickly the search string gets garbled.

The site https://www.searchenginecolossus.com, although somewhat dated, has hundreds of search engines of all kinds.

Many of these engines don't have crawlers, so you need to register sites on them manually. I don't bother with those engines.

Still, there's a few gems in there.

Back to google: You can go to the news and get a list of headlines, but clicking on any story gives a white screen.

Also, https://www.whatismybrowser.com can't seem to detect if javascript is enabled or not in IE11. I have it enabled, but some of the pages say it's not enabled.

Ya I get that on IE6 also.. Scripts are indeed enabled but it doesnt detect they are...

Its interesting how Google works on IE5 for Mac.. IE5 is the last one for mac isnt it??

Its interesting they let it go so long on google that any browser can use it,then all of a sudden google and bing block most older stuff..

I recommend using the protoweb proxy server for Win 9x/2000

Proxy servers are very useful,especially now when they are trying to block us...

Have you tried these (or aren't they what you are after, back in the 1990s they were search sites like google and yahoo):

lycos.com
webcrawler.com

ratfink wrote on 2025-12-09, 23:39:

Have you tried webcrawler.com

Uses Cloudflare, which means that you won't be able to access the site unless you have modern JavaScript and a more recent web browser.

Lycos works on IE11. Webcrawler.com is no use at all.

Error 1010 Ray ID: 9accafc7fc4bf903 • 2025-12-12 10:54:57 UTC Access denied […]
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Error 1010
Ray ID: 9accafc7fc4bf903 • 2025-12-12 10:54:57 UTC
Access denied

What happened?

The owner of this website (www.webcrawler.com) has banned your access based on your browser's signature (9accafc7fc4bf903-ua98).

Please see https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/tro … ors/error-1010/ for more details.

MrSegfault wrote on 2025-12-10, 00:19:

ratfink wrote on 2025-12-09, 23:39:

Have you tried webcrawler.com

Uses Cloudflare, which means that you won't be able to access the site unless you have modern JavaScript and a more recent web browser.

Additionally after lycos bought basically every non-Google/MS search engine it became a malware fest

MrSegfault wrote on 2025-12-10, 00:19:

Uses Cloudflare, which means that you won't be able to access the site unless you have modern JavaScript and a more recent web browser.

Has the world tried using this thing called HTML? JavaScript should have followed Netscape's other mistake, the blink tag, into oblivion.

On Vista, I applied the TLS 1.2 registry patch which enables it in IE9. After this, duckduckgo lite works, among many other sites. Oddly, there's still heaps of sites that still can't connect, including every single SSL testing site. Of course, anything protected by cloudflare is blocked, as expected.

Also, found out how to enable TLS 1.3 on Firefox 52.9 esr (XP and Vista). Seems it's a well-known thing, but I only found it yesterday. Youtube works perfectly too, even though they warn that it's unsupported. The only issue (for me) is that ublock origin doesn't block the never-ending ads, even though it says it's blocking hundreds of things.

Updated to latest mypal (74.1.4) on XP, and R3dfox (146.0) on Vista.

Looks like lycos.com died, or at least it no longer has a dns entry.

Going through a bunch of old computers getting rid of google, what a nuisance. Now I have to go back and get rid of lycos as well.

So, the browsers on 95 through to w2k, most can connect to at least one of bing.com, search.yahoo.com, or lite.duckduckgo.com/lite . Opera complains about every certificate, which must be manually ticked to keep forever, then accepted. Other browsers seem to handle it a lot better. IE6 can't connect to any of these search sites, so I'm making the home page a blank screen on it.

Checked out a bunch more search pages and found 3 more that work on some early browsers.

These being dogpile.com, mojeek.com, and naver.com .

naver.com is Chinese, but you can ignore that part, it still finds English-language sites. When you go to the naver.com start page, it may be completely blank, but just start typing and your search query will appear.

Of the other pages I checked, some present a page to submit a query, but then think you're a robot, or show no finds, in both cases useless. Some other sites had no common cypher, or just did nothing at all. And, the last group were subscription models, where either the user or the searched sites have to pay, again useless.

IE6 still doesn't work with any search engine, it is becoming increasingly redundant.

So, the final (atm) list of "real" search engines is:

lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
au.search.yahoo.com
bing.com
dogpile.com
mojeek.com
naver.com

One thing to beware of with K-Meleon (and similar) browsers is they can take 99% CPU on some sites (e.g Yahoo), or even crash (Brave).