There used to be more internet. Not more websites — more variety: oddball personal homepages, obsessive hobbyist forums, hand-built archives kept alive by one stubborn enthusiast for twenty years. Most of it still exists. It just stopped showing up, buried under SEO farms and AI filler. Here is a field guide to finding the good stuff again.
The fastest way back in is a search engine that isn't optimized for commerce. Wiby indexes small, hobbyist, classic-style pages and has a “surprise me” button that drops you somewhere wonderful. Marginalia runs its own crawler that deliberately favors text-heavy, non-commercial sites. Curlie is the living successor to the human-edited DMOZ directory, and ForumScout searches the forum discussions Google and Reddit hide. When all else fails, Million Short lets you delete the most popular million sites from your results and see what's underneath.
Before chat apps walled everything off, knowledge lived in forums — and the best ones are still here. For handheld hacking and homebrew, GBAtemp and wololo.net/talk (the PSP and Vita scene) are still active. Retro-PC tinkerers live at VOGONS — “Very Old Games On New Systems.” For Linux, LinuxQuestions and the Arch BBS hold answers no chatbot can match; and niche obsessions have out-documented every manufacturer at places like Head-Fi (audio) and Bogleheads (investing).
Some sites are simply primary sources. textfiles.com is Jason Scott's archive of the BBS era — the actual text files of 1980s–90s computer culture. The WikiWikiWeb is the very first wiki ever made, still online. Everything2 is a pre-Wikipedia experiment in collaborative writing that's stranger and more human than what replaced it. And Standard Ebooks hand-typesets public-domain books into something genuinely beautiful.
Finally, the web made purely for joy. Neocities is the spiritual heir to GeoCities — thousands of handcrafted personal sites to wander. Cameron's World is a loving collage stitched from salvaged GeoCities pages. caedes.net still hosts its old digital-art and desktop-wallpaper community. radio.garden lets you spin a globe and hear live local radio from anywhere on Earth. And The Useless Web is one button that flings you at something gloriously pointless.
This is only a fraction of what's out there. Start with the discovery engines and follow your curiosity — the old web rewards wandering in a way the algorithmic one never will.