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| Author | retrosearch.org - new search engine for retro computers (Read 248513 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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garambo
16 MB  Posts: 29 System 7 Newcomer! 
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on: November 26, 2023, 20:08
I found this website today and it is an absolute gem! Speaking of websites working with System 7... I made a a Web Application to search and browse the Internet from old computers, it is available at http://retrosearch.org It provides web search results from DuckDuckGo and basic text browsing. It works great even on older versions of Netscape (tested it with Netscape 2 on System 7 up to IE 4 and 5 on later systems) |
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #1 on: November 27, 2023, 02:32
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Nice! Another retro search site 
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #2 on: November 27, 2023, 09:02
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@garambo - Benvenuto to our friendly little community! :-) Nice job with retrosearch! I've briefly tried it this morning and on the first attempt I find it faster parsing the content and outputting it than frogfind.com does. Keep it up! :-) From my test, Frogfind does handle special chars better - which is something you may want to improve on with the next update? Here's an example of me searching a local chocolate store's site for it's opening hours: Click for pic (68k beware, 300kb image!) One thing both searches don't do is to create a text-only navigation bar. That would be a big advantage to have because currently you'd have to search for each page of the website individually. I would now have to go back to search and redefine my search to search specifically for the opening hours page. Cumbersome. Even more so, if a store e.g. only puts this into its footer and doesn't even have an individual page. I also noticed something in your code, I'll PM you about it :-)
Last Edit: November 27, 2023, 09:07 by Bolkonskij
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garambo
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16 MB Posts: 29 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #3 on: November 27, 2023, 14:16
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Thank you @cballero and @Bolkonskij! I made some small improvements to the layout rendering, the issues you mentioned should be gone now! Regarding the special characters issues, I chose to use ISO-8859-1 for page encoding, which should be more compatible with older systems and is representative of the HTML 2.0 standard I am planning to make the pages adhere to. The UTF-8 charset, of course, would solve all these issues, but might not be supported by older browsers (before Netscape 4), not sure why it is used by frogfind as it might cause issues with characters that might be correctly decoded otherwise. The navigation bar idea sounds amazing! I'll definitely draft something about that!
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Knezzen
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Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #4 on: November 27, 2023, 18:37
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Very cool, garambo! About UTF-8, I still think it would be cool to render it in UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1. I know that the common Amiga and Atari browsers handle it just fine, as well as Netscape 3 and up and iCab (probably Opera and Internet Explorer as well, but I haven't checked) on the Mac (both 68k and PowerPC). So you would get those "special chars" even on our beloved System 7 Macs for instance )
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garambo
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16 MB Posts: 29 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #5 on: November 27, 2023, 21:11
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Thanks for your suggestion @Knezzen! From my tests on System 7 machines and some more recent Macs I couldn't get UTF-8 to work correctly on Netscape Navigator 3.x but I was surprised by checking the results using IE 4 which seems to support it (with some issues), so I think I'm convinced to make the big move to Unicode! Edit: ...or maybe make encoding configurable by the user
Last Edit: November 27, 2023, 21:44 by garambo
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #6 on: November 28, 2023, 09:24
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Well done! Making it a user choice would be best, but I think you're pretty safe with UTF-8 at this point. I can't speak for other platforms, but on the Macintosh, everyone with a 68030 CPU can basically run Netscape 3/4 fine. Older machines are rather going to use text-based browsers like MacLynx due to performance issues anyway. Even back then a Mac Plus wasn't a machine to browse the www and would rather be used for calling into BBSes, Gopher and e-mail.
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Knezzen
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Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #7 on: November 28, 2023, 09:59
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Since even MacLynx supports UTF-8 now (sort of), I think it’s safe to make it at least user definable somehow. Regardless, good job! When can we expect a web to Gopher translator with search capabilities? 
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #8 on: November 29, 2023, 16:54
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I already pestered Vincenzo with my idea about a fully retro-browser compatible sports results page leveraging one of the sports APIs available. So we could look up game results directly from our System 7 machines :-)
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garambo
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16 MB Posts: 29 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #9 on: December 06, 2023, 18:13
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Made some updates yesterday, now the application can be configured with custom encoding and HTML version - it is currently deployed with UTF-8 and HTML 3.2 respectively, but these can be freely set via properties when self-hosted. Next up, there will be the possibility to choose directly how to encode and interpret the page, but most importantly, I'm working on your precious suggestions of making available sports (or maybe news and/or weather) feeds and improve website navigation.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #10 on: December 07, 2023, 07:35
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Congrats on releasing 0.3! Do you have any idea why this page won't render in retrosearch? One thing I often use retrosearch / frogfind for is checking the opening hours on some local businesses. Much to my surprise, both have problems rendering most these pages?
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garambo
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16 MB Posts: 29 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #11 on: December 07, 2023, 08:54
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Thank you! They share the same base Mozilla Readability library (in the case of RetroSearch a JVM implementation) to parse the content of the page so rendering might be very similar. In this case, however, the issue it's not related to page parsing, but rather to the response given by the server. The web server is behind CloudFront, which returns a 403 (Forbidden) to the internal HTTP client, suspecting suspicious traffic. Edit: a fix will be soon released with 0.4-testing (CloudFlare might be blocking the current IP address of the machine where RetroSearch is deployed though) - also including a basic (and best-effort) site navigation functionality
Last Edit: December 07, 2023, 11:05 by garambo
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #12 on: December 08, 2023, 08:29
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Very nice, looking forward to it. Thanks for your efforts! On a related note, when I try to download e.g. issue 97 2023 from this page by "right-click - save target" it won't download the actual file, but "browse.html" EDIT: Since we're kinda going off-topic, I've decided to split the topic and give retrosearch.org its own well-deserved thread
Last Edit: December 08, 2023, 08:35 by Bolkonskij
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garambo
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16 MB Posts: 29 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #13 on: December 08, 2023, 09:54
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@Bolkonskij Thank you for testing it so thoroughly (but also for giving retrosearch its own thread!) Downloads are not supported at the moment, as links are made relative to retrosearch to allow web browsing - as part of the browsing experience enhancements, this will definitely be a priority.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #14 on: December 08, 2023, 13:14
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Hope is that you'll continue development, garambo. This is very promising. Downloads would be a huge plus. Frogfind doesn't support it either. It'd eliminate a lot of the necessary "bridging", that is using a Mac as a "bridge" between new and old worlds.
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