frogfind.au - An Australian instance of FrogFind!
A quick FAQ on an Australian clone of an unconventional search engine
Who made FrogFind?
The original FrogFind was made by Sean, A.K.A. Action Retro on YouTube. He works on a lot of 80's and 90's Macs (and other vintage machines), and really likes to try and get them online. However, the modern internet is not kind to old machines, which generally cannot handle the complicated javascript, CSS, and encryption that modern sites have. However, they can browse basic websites just fine. Sean decided to see how much of the internet he could turn into basic websites, so that old machines can browse the modern internet once again!
Why an Australian instance of FrogFind?
This instance of FrogFind is hosted by Ross - I'm an Australian retro computing enthusiast, and much like Sean, I enjoy getting 80's and 90's computers online.
While playing with FrogFind I was interested in learning how it worked, and after clicking around found that the code was available on GitHub. I spun up my own instance to have a play with, and after making some minor modifications to allow selecting the DuckDuckGo search region, I thought it might be fun to buy a domain and make it publicly available.
How does FrogFind work?
The search functionality of FrogFind is basically a custom wrapper for DuckDuckGo search, converting the results to extremely basic HTML that old browsers can read. When clicking through to pages from search results, those pages are processed through a PHP port of Mozilla's Readability, which is what powers Firefox's reader mode. I then further strip down the results to be as basic HTML as possible.
Which machines has FrogFind been tested on?
Sean designed FrogFind with classic Macs in mind, and he tests on his SE/30 to make sure it looks good in 1 bit color with a 512x384 resolution. Most of his testing has been on Netscape 1.1N and 2.0.2, as well as a few 68k Mac versions of iCab. FrogFind should also work great on any text-based web browser!
Ross has tested FrogFind on various machines, including, but not limited to:
- A Mac Classic II, running MacOS 7.1, with Netscape 2.0.2
- A Toshiba Libretto 100CT, running Windows 98, with Netscape Communicator 4.7
- PowerBook 1400C running MacOS 8.6, with Internet Explorer 5
How can I get in touch?
You can contact Sean via email - actionretro@pm.me
You can contact Ross via email - ross@someguynamedross.com