Clew.se: A Refreshing Search Engine for Discovery

In my last post, I lamented about the state of the web and how futile it is to discover interesting content online. I shared that post on Mastodon yesterday. Within a few minutes, I received a reply asking if I had used a new search engine, by the name of Clew.

Clew? A new search engine? I was intrigued.

Clew is a search engine unlike any other I have used. It’s primary purpose is to aid in discovering writing from independent creators. This means blogs. When you use Clew, there’s an implicit understanding at play: You won’t get Wikipedia results, nor will you ever see articles from the mainstream sites.

Clew is a labor of love by Benjamin Holon. There are no ads or algorithms at play when you search with Clew. There are no corporate sponsors. Clew is currently 100% donation supported – and the monies earned are used to cover costs associated with managing the server and domain name and pay any associated fees from running and developing Clew.

Clew works on modern web browsers, and text-based browsers like Lynx. There are some minor color tweaks still needed to properly display type when using Safari, but it works fine on Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Using Clew these past few days reminded me of the excitement and delight I felt when using Yahoo!’s hand-curated links back in the mid-90’s. I have discovered many interesting new-to-me blogs, all thanks to Clew. Give it a whirl – I think you’ll like it.

-Krishna