Ninfex Is a New Take on Internet Search

June 10, 2021

The creator of “experimental” search site Ninfex is trying a different approach that uses neither crawlers nor AI. The site’s Hello page explains:

“We rely on 2 proxies for search relevance. First: URL score (user votes). Second: Links to discussions on major forums. All submissions on Ninfex are votable by users. When you submit a link, you can also submit up to 5 supporting links (to discussions about that link) from external forums. Among the current submissions you are most likely to see forum links to reddit, hackernews, lobsters, stackexchange & tildes because those are the forums that I frequent most often.”

Yes, the young site still leans heavily toward material based on its maker’s interests, but that could change as its usership grows. The founder, who goes by the name traindreams, writes:

“I am the maker of Ninfex and right now I’m actively pushing to build the index around my personal wiki / research notes / bookmarks. That is why, the home feed mostly contains topics of my interest. The following is a list of those topics.”

See the page to explore that list of diverse and interesting topics, from Art to Psychology to Startups. Perhaps you will be inspired to vote or add a link. Traindreams has already made some changes based on user feedback, like cleaning up the UI, and promises more to come as the index grows. It looks like the idea is quality over quantity; we are curious to see if the enterprise takes off.

Cynthia Murrell, June 10, 2021

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