“ However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.”
Something people used to do is to use search engines to find images with file names that indicate they were from a digital camera. You could find all sorts of interesting photos that people had uploaded to share with their friends not realising that search engines would index them.
I recall a thread years and years ago about a guy who found an abandoned digital camera in the woods, only to take it home and extract the photos from its SD card, and as everyone poured over them, they began noticing odd figures in the trees and so on.
That's the kind of fun group activity I love about these mysterious things
You can actually do this with YouTube. By search for MOV001 etc.
Mental Outlaw did a video demonstrating this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ho_KDPi_U
Good luck “searching” for anything on YouTube in 2024..
It's 2024 and need a search engine that doesn't suck
https://kagi.com is by far the best out there IMO.
Also:
- http://startpage.com
(Quite the story, that ...)
http://astronaut.io/ - YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13413225
Got a link to those photos? Sounds like an interesting story, whether true or not.
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/I_Found_a_Digital_Camera...
The photos feel like a story being told. Meant to be in an almost serial way.
Yeah where's that link? That sounds fun.
There is a subreddit for Open Directories!
There's an even more fitting (inactive) subreddit for filename searches here: https://old.reddit.com/r/IMGXXXX/
Here's a list of prefixes to search for:
There's also the excellent http://astronaut.io, which I found via Hacker News. It automatically plays short segments from YouTube videos with those default filenames, inevitably surfacing a kind of gallery of the mundane: The unproduced, untargeted, mostly unwatched, everyday moments of real life.
The amount of (AI generated?) crypto spam is mind boggling. Most of the other videos seem to be amateur sport events, but the rest contains a few gems of random stranger's life :)
Back in the day, searching for "top secret", "highly confidential", "for private use only", etc, ... would return interesting results.
Distinguished seekers also searched: "NOFORN" "EYES ONLY"
This reminds me of opendirectories subreddit. So many random stuff.