A field guide to other worlds

Other worlds. Little doorways.

Take a side path. These smaller indexes grow as our patient scouts explore.

Gopher, Spartan and Nex use plaintext between our relay and the remote host. Your connection here stays HTTPS. Never send secrets through these worlds. Field notes & crawl policy →

How these paths are explored

Coordinated scouts rotate among three protocol-specific crawlers and exchange published links with Gemini. Free workers follow another trail when a distant server is slow. Published links lead deeper; robots exclusions and host delays are respected. We do not guess private paths, submit forms, run scripts or bypass access controls.

Counts mean searchable resource URLs and destination server addresses—not unique authors or unique articles. A queue is not an index. These young collections will be much smaller than Gemini; incomplete coverage is part of the honest map.

Gopher Burrows: 237,423 indexed items / 397 gopherhole servers / 300000 known URLs.

Spartan Outpost: 17,519 indexed pages / 24 sites / 33615 known URLs.

Nightfall Express: 5,008 indexed entries / 17 station servers / 22436 known URLs.

Destination counts group server addresses, not individual authors. A shared server can contain many capsules, gopherholes or Nex stations. Gopher items are indexed menus and text files; Nex entries are indexed documents and directories. Gemini capsules in the selector answered within 30 days; smaller-world destinations contain indexed content.

Choose multiple worlds for one interleaved result list. Gemini gets the first seat when selected; every result names its world. Each world contributes up to 200 ranked candidates, with repeated copies placed under More matches. This is not a claim that ranking scores mean the same thing across protocols.

Word, phrase, prefix, exclusion, title, site and date searches work in the smaller indexes. Language labels are conservative estimates; language filters remain Gemini-only. Images and other files download in your browser (up to 16 MiB per file). Gopher search menus, Spartan forms/uploads and custom ports still need a native client; ordinary text, menus and onward links work here.

Site owners: publish /robots.txt (Gopher selector /robots.txt), using User-agent: gemsearch, indexer, archiver or *. Webproxy exclusions control our reader. Contact hello@braigetori.org for exclusion or a new public starting point.

Why these three? People already publish across them; their communities and small, implementable protocols suit personal exploration. This is an editorial choice, not an internet-wide popularity poll.

Scouts / honest map checks

Our coordinated scouts follow published paths: broad discovery, deeper detours and scheduled return visits. Gemini stays our main expedition.

2 small-world network scouts share one frontier; 1 requests in flight at the last report. Each host gets breathing room between visits.

Gemini: last audited 1,365,474 indexed URLs / 577,133 distinct content hashes / 788,341 duplicate copies at 2026-09-17 11:10 UTC.

Index membership: checked; no missing or stray search rows.

Gopher: last audited 237,329 indexed URLs / 211,717 distinct content hashes / 25,612 duplicate copies at 2026-09-17 09:59 UTC.

Nex: last audited 5,008 indexed URLs / 3,085 distinct content hashes / 1,923 duplicate copies at 2026-09-17 09:59 UTC.

Spartan: last audited 17,500 indexed URLs / 16,053 distinct content hashes / 1,447 duplicate copies at 2026-09-17 09:59 UTC.

Index membership: checked; no missing or stray search rows.

Distinct content means matching stored content hashes within each world, not unique authors or ideas. Duplicate copies collapse in ranked results; valid addresses and archives are retained. Audits run hourly and retry repairs; these dated figures may trail the growing live URL counts.

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