The guy who owns frogfind.com finally fixed his site!

It was going to a blank page when searching!!

For a week or so and I had been emailing him.. It was like he didnt care anymore...

I fixed the certificate-store problem on windows 98 and some other old OS's. When you get to the screen to select a store, click the checkbox underneath to show the choices of where the certificates go, and choose Registry. Then they will all happily go in.

More search engines have abandoned the oldest browsers. Yahoo still works on most (au.search.yahoo.com) but not all, while nearly all the other worthwhile engines no longer work.

Hi, just for the sake of curiosity: Is or was there any search engine site that worked with the earliest web browsers?
Such as Minuet internet suite, which does not support sending user input to the server?
Again, just for sake of curiosity. I wonder if there was or is a site with, say, an alphabetic index or a virtual keyboard.
I can imagine that such a virtual keyboard might have called an html site for each letter clicked, followed by a re-direction to the main site.

DuckDuckGo lite is nice, but it would be cool if they added image search to it.

My earliest browser was IE2, didn't actually get to use the internet until Netscape at work.

Some of the search regressions:
- dogpile.com has turned into dog shit, refusing to connect.
- lycos.com delivers a blank white screen, unusable
- bing can't decide what to do: in IE8 it says the browser is unsupported; in netscape you get the whole screen but does nothing after entering the search term; most other browsers a grey screen with the search box. After entering the search term it returns the list of results, but choosing any of them gets a bing error and not able to get anywhere. Bing encrypts the links so you can't just copy and paste it. Nasty site.
- tried a few others from the old days and none worked.

Wayback Machine badly needs a decent search engine. It barely makes use of meta keywords even, mostly trying to match the query with domain names. As a result, a huge part -- perhaps even most -- of the ancient web is functionally inaccessible because you need a direct link or URL to access the sites. (the search engines drop defunct sites from their database after a couple months and will not return them as results)

bakemono wrote on 2025-12-05, 16:16:

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

Image search no longer works 🙁

Robbbert wrote on 2026-06-11, 12:44:

More search engines have abandoned the oldest browsers. Yahoo still works on most (au.search.yahoo.com) but not all, while nearly all the other worthwhile engines no longer work.

Sadly they force SSL so it wont work on IE6...

So many stupid ppl out there that believe the lies and block HTTP for no reason!!

DuckDuckGo lite works in Opera 12.18 once you approve certificates.

Edit: Won't work in Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0. Opera 2.62 crashes hard. IE6 can't connect.

I am able to use Google. The HTTP version still works.

To use with Links web browser run LINKS-2.30.EXE with these parameters:

1-http.fake-user-agent xxx -html-auto-refresh 0 http://www.google.com

to search by date: add &tbs=qdr:x to URL and change x with d, w, m or y (last day/24 hours, week, month or year)

To use with MicroWeb DOS browser just load http://www.google.com

Mircoweb connects with Google.

Searching however requires Javascript.

DuckDuckGoLite won't connect because it requires HTTPS.

Norton Commander wrote on 2026-10-13, 19:57:

Searching however requires Javascript.

It seems that google.com redirects to the localized version of your region. It works in some but in others don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Locali … s_of_google.com

In my case redirects to google.es which works:

But in any case, MicroWeb does not support HTTPS. You should try Links web browser using the parameters in my previous post to avoid redirection.

maybe try askjeeves? used that back in the late 90's

I am really disgusted how things have gone...

People can be controlled SO EASILY it is sad!!

search.yahoo.com no longer works on a lot of old browsers, it's changed what's allowed in the last month or so.

Haven't done much testing yet, just finding out whenever I drag out an old machine.

The only search engine that works with legacy browsers is Frogfind.

Unfortunately all the results are to modern websites that won't work with olders browsers.

There's no way to use search engines with legacy browsers unless you use a proxy.