While browsing HN recently, I came across a new concept in the comments - Webring. The idea immediately interested me, especially since, in my opinion, it is still applicable today, probably more than ever. let's start from the beginning
What is webring?
This is a method of organizing websites in the early 1990s. These were groups of pages that were linked together via hyperlinks, creating a ring of websites. Each page in the webring had a link to the next page in the ring, thus creating a loop or cycle. Simple right? Let's see what such a webring consisting of 3 pages would look like - example1.com example2.com example3.com
Each of these pages had a navigation bar that contained two links to its neighbors' pages in the form: next, previous. The Webring's home page was also often accessible, with links to all other pages.
Webrings were intended to facilitate navigation through websites with similar topics. Thanks to them, users could browse different pages related to a given topic by clicking on links and moving from one page to another within the webring.
From what I noticed, several websites on neocities use such methods. Very nostalgic, but neocities themselves are nostalgic.
Why might this apply today?
First of all, webrings were often related to a specific topic, e.g. cooking, programming, car mechanics, so if we had already visited one such website and said - it's a cool website, I can learn a lot from it - we also immediately had links to similar websites, but maybe touching on other issues. This allowed us to quickly expand what we already know or can do with things that we were not even aware of before.
Today this may apply because there are plenty of small websites that have brilliant, well-explained material, but are not indexed by Google or other search engines. To put it simply, it is practically impossible to find them and creators often don't care whether they will have 5-10 people visiting their website or 50,000. If the creator does not take care of SEO himself, or other users do not link to this website on HN, Reddit or another platform, that website that is completely hidden from the world.
The second idea that came to my mind while writing was the Dark Web. It has long been known that websites with the .onion domain require knowledge of the full, complex link to the website we want to visit. Due to the lack of search engines, we can somehow rely on Hiddenwiki, but Webrings is something that suits me in this case.
It is a pity that webring is a forgotten topic today, but it had an important significance in the history of the Internet and influenced the development of website navigation.