What is DuckFind?DuckFind is a search engine and article reader for old computers. The modern web is megabytes of scripts, styles and fonts behind TLS connections a vintage browser cannot even open -- so DuckFind fetches today's pages on the server and hands your machine clean HTML 3.2: no scripts, no stylesheets, images converted to small GIFs. It renders on anything from a System 7 Mac or a Windows 3.1 box to an Apple II with a text browser. Search is powered by DuckDuckGo; the Wayback reader, news portal and personal feed reader, street maps with directions, a PDF viewer, a file-download proxy, Hacker News with comment threads, a translator, gopher, Wiby classic-web search, and the bang shortcuts (try !help) come along for the ride. Inspired by FrogFind -- an independent, open-source implementation you can run yourself. PrivacySearches and pages are fetched by the server on your behalf, so websites and search engines see DuckFind's address, not yours. Fetched pages and images live briefly in a server cache keyed by URL -- never by visitor -- and expire within days. Rate limiting stores a salted hash of your address, never the address itself. The optional !ai shortcut sends that question -- and nothing else -- to Anthropic to generate the answer. This site keeps no logs of what you search or read -- no web-server access logs, and no logging proxy or CDN in front. One inherent limit: vintage browsers speak plain HTTP, so the networks between you and this server can observe that traffic in transit -- the price of working on old machines. A modern browser can use the encrypted https:// address instead. LimitsLimits keep DuckFind available for everyone (and keep its search backend happy). Per visitor:
Shared by all visitors: a daily budget of 5000 new searches and 500 AI answers. When it runs out, recently searched terms keep working from cache and everything resets at midnight UTC. Fetches are capped in size and time, so very large pages and images arrive trimmed rather than not at all. The download proxy accepts files up to 50 MB. DuckFind -- the modern web in plain HTML, for vintage browsers |