Meklet:

Meklet is a specialized search aimed at specialists in the fields of archival science, library science and public work. The search is intended to streamline existing searches and achieve faster results by removing the middle man from the search function. In doing so, Meklet uses simple HTML and CSS, providing only a new interface that accesses the searches of large web pages.

My name is Robert J. Tomsons and I am a millenial software developer from Germany. I trained as an IT specialist for software development and then rather unsuccessfully studied two semesters of information and communication technology at the University of Dortmund. Since then I've been working from project to project and started to develop Meklet in my spare time. I'm a farm boy by birth and the first in my family to do anything that doesn't involve killing animals, building wooden furniture or forging steel. Nevertheless, I love the craft and am pretty good at fixing things. Otherwise I live with my cat Dios in a small apartment and deal with art and rock/heavy metal music records.

Please have a look at the video Rant on Laser Printers by Adam Savage. The title isn't quite as well chosen because it's actually about a rant regarding the Google (and another) search engine(s). This used to happen to me too. I was looking for something specific and couldn't find it. Only when I had wasted an unbearably long time, I sometimes got to the good results. Most search engines have passed their zenith and black-hat SEOs and advertising has largely destroyed the concept. The problem (for me) was actually quite simple to solve.

I already knew the websites I was looking at, mostly programmers, developers or social websites. But also many universities, archives and libraries. Or websites where I could research scientific papers for my work. The search engines were just squeezing in and cluttering up my results. So I wanted a very simple web interface where I could gather all the searches I needed for my daily work. Meklet was born. As with any project, the path wasn't clear from the beginning and I had to test a few versions before I found a proper flow, but I think the project is going in the right direction.

Since Meklet started as a simple project, both development were specialized in HTML and CSS. it was deliberately omitted Javascript, so that the website can be loaded quickly and also works in older web browsers.

The development took place since the middle of the year 2022. At that time the website was only locally on my computer and I used that only for my private searches. After that I had a Google Firebase domain for a short time, but parked the project there only briefly. On 22.09.2022 I created the first snapshot on Archive.org, which refers to the current domain. That's kind of the official starting point of my project, because before that everything was in a super uncertain alpha phase. As always with a project where you don't start documenting until later, the true beginnings are mostly lost in the darkness of history.

Yes, I do! "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this , or this!"