Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/almost-all-searches-on-my-independent-search-engine-are-now-from-seo-spam-bots/

by m-i-l • 4 years ago

696 377 4 years ago

blog.searchmysite.net

If this was the spam for a search engine (almost) nobody uses, it makes you wonder how much abuse the major search engines face

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

They face a lot. I always browse with incognito on safari, and I quite often have to do captchas on google and bing etc. to prove I’m not a computer…

If there is money involved and value in being able to trick search engines, I’m not surprised it’s a thriving business of grift.

hihihihi1234• 4 years ago

Why do you use Bing?

sonicggg• 4 years ago

I'd assume they have more control though. I noticed whenever I use Google after connecting to NordVPN, it requires a captcha the first time.

Nextgrid7• 4 years ago

My understanding is that this wasn't about gaming this particular search engine itself, and more about the spammers using the search engine for its intended purpose of finding spam-free content so they can then use this content as copy for their spam posts.

ricardo81• 4 years ago

Indeed. There are various SEO "rank tracking" services that scrape millions of SERPs a month.

buro9• 4 years ago

This is for comment spam.

It's trying to find a long tail of popular but not top listed blogs for the purpose of posting comments with the much desired links to the SEO target.

Veen2• 4 years ago

Does that work any more? I thought everyone put nofollow attributes on comment links.

0des• 4 years ago

If it didnt work, would you still see it?

albatrosstrophy• 4 years ago

Ona tangential note, I remember a time when Google had the option to search only for 'discussions'. The results were amazing and accurate as it scoured online forums. Almost all issue I had (was following the rooting scene closely back then) were quickly resolved. Then suddenly it got removed for reasons unknown to me. Anyone knows if it's replicatable today?

blackhaz• 4 years ago

Sometimes adding "reddit" to a search query produces fantastic results.

jrussbowman3• 4 years ago

I do this all the time

tunap• 4 years ago

I have had some success adding "forum", when looking for trade discussions; eg: controls & automotive. With all the walled silos on the net, this is much less useful with every passing day. On the bright side, I don't have to use -twitter & -facebook, so there's that.

throwaway27727• 4 years ago

This is great but it seems reddit has done something to mess with their date reporting. When looking for recent posts, I might see a result on Google that says it was posted in the last few days, but on clicking the result will actually be from years ago.

SirAiedail• 4 years ago

I use "site:reddit.com" to fully restrict to that. You can even filter by subreddit that way.

Works well with HN and other sites, too.

matheusmoreira6• 4 years ago

Not sure for how much longer this is going to work. Plenty of marketers make fake posts there in grassroots campaigns. Reddit itself is an advertising company.

God I hope they never find out about this site.

sodality2• 4 years ago

Brave Search does have a discussion search section.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

I have a suspicion they removed it because of the amount of spam on those forums. There's tons of abandoned forums that are only occupied by spambots.

There's even pretty convincing looking accounts and messages that turn out to be spam in the end, once they start trying to post links.

I have Akismet on the comment section of the Wordpress front-end of the site I run, it basically said something like 99.99% of attempted comments were spam. I'm sure the same applies to e-mail and the like.

6510• 4 years ago

Everyone is a spammer according to Akismet. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of that 99.9999% is false positives.

You could start a website for people you don't like, flag all the comments as spam and they wont be allowed to post anything elsewhere - forever!

matsemann• 4 years ago

Reminds of those "fake forums" I sometimes see when exhausting google's results. Found a screenshot of the concept here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/jxtr1k/but_it_requir...

f0xJtpvHYTVQ88B• 4 years ago

Brave Search recently implemented "discussions". From what I've seen it is mostly Reddit results but StackExchange also can appear there.

https://searchengineland.com/brave-search-discussions-383706

nspattak• 4 years ago

This is an awsome website that I was not aware of!

mlatu• 4 years ago

and there you have it: nobody uses it because nobody knows of it.

of course for a bot it is easy to remember your site, its just another url in a long list of others... but what does a human do? they go to their fav search site, be it duck duck go, google or bing... perhaps even yahoo.

i remember when google just started out, back then you would have used askjeeves, altavista or yahoo... google was really good compared to those... and the name was new, kinda orthogonal to existing search engines (except yahoo perhaps) and perhaps the most important bit: the site was "clean" except for the searchbar, there was nothing distracting there. you opened it and knew it is for looking up stuff

now, to join in, this late in the game? difficult. difficult.

maybe it would be easier if it specialized for some niche? idk.

dear OP: i'll try to remember your searchengine, but i cant promise to become a regular

jacquesm4• 4 years ago

One day we'll have an internet for humans exclusively. On another note, with 160K requests / day from bots you could of course simply block the bots structurally assuming they are nice enough to identify themselves. Block all of AWS and Google, Russia, China, NK and a couple of other bot hot spots and the service may well become more successful for regular users because they get faster results. Bots can afford to wait, humans are often impatient. And with 2 hits / second by bots that may well become a factor.

netsharc• 4 years ago

I wonder how that could be accomplished. Maybe they'll build a brain interface to replace the "I'm not a robot" captchas/add a TPM chip to the brain.

And then the spammers will start selling tools to fake the responses. Or pay Filipinos a few cents a month to have the chip implanted to their brains...

jacquesm4• 4 years ago

Well, we can do it with the roads, I'm pretty sure if the incentives are right we can come up with a way to do it online. As long as we have not passed the Turing test ;)

The current web seems to favor machines talking to machines and that is definitely not how it was intended.

Nextgrid7• 4 years ago

Or pay Filipinos a few cents a month to have the chip implanted to their brains...

That's the problem with blocking bots as opposed to malicious behavior. Bot blocking is actually trivial and very cheap to bypass as long as you can buy slave-like labor for peanuts.

Ideally you'd want to block malicious behavior (when it comes to SEO spam, downrank anything for-profit such as ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc) instead to remove the incentives for spamming, regardless of whether it's a bot or human.

In this case the only problem is that this search engine gives away resources (search queries) for free and then complains that people (in this case spammers) are taking it. It's not really a spam problem - they'd complain equally well if they had some legitimate user that happened to need tons of search queries to achieve their task.

The only solution here is to start charging for stuff that costs money, and then it doesn't really matter who is on the other side, as long as they pay the bill.

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

This isn't indexing by search engine spiders, which are usually fairly benign and easy to identify with user agent etc. This is searches for "scraping footprints" executed en mass by "SEO proxy farms", which are designed to be very difficult to detect (e.g. originating from globally distributed residential IPs, quite possibly ordinary home user's machines which have been compromised). The main giveaway that something is a "scraping footprint" is the long search query which includes text that would appear on a template, e.g. ""This website is proudly using the open source classifieds software OSClass" rega turntables", for someone looking for OSClass-powered pages they could "search engine optimise" for the query "rega turntables".

thesuitonym2• 4 years ago

That's funny to me, because if I'm searching for something that would have been around between 2004-2012, I'll often append "Powered by phpBB" (or other software) to find posts about it on forums.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

And the cycle will reboot itself again.

The silos we have nowadays were there before the Internet took off, on BBS, Compuserve, Geocities, ....

Apparently the majority of regular humans likes to have centralized providers they can reach out to, instead of the freadom of decentralized content.

jacquesm4• 4 years ago

Yes, that's true. Bots tend to follow the money.

xmodem• 4 years ago

Block all of AWS and Google,

Google for "residential proxy". This is already a huge industry, and it's difficult not to see how we haven't lost this war a long time ago.

kmeisthax2• 4 years ago

...so you're going to write your own HTTP requests? Encrypt your traffic and validate certificates by hand? Toggle in each TCP header from a memory debugger?

Most of the Internet is bots because humans don't actually generate HTTP traffic - they fire up a bot called a "browser" to do it for them. The challenge for anti-spam is to distinguish which bots are currently being directly controlled by humans and which ones are not-so-directly controlled by such. This isn't even a hard line; I've frequently hit Hacker News' bot detection just by upvoting a comment and then clicking reply too quickly.

jacquesm4• 4 years ago

I really don't understand your comment.

Just so we don't have to argue about what constitutes a bot and what does not I propose we use this definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

oefrha3• 4 years ago

I didn’t notice at first because the web analytics only shows real users, and the unusual activity could only be seen by looking at the server logs.

Sounds like everyone blocking analytics (Plausible in this case), e.g. myself just now, is lumped in with spam bots.

Of course, analytics blocking can’t meaningfully swing the ~99.99% statistic.

rhn_mk1• 4 years ago

I would argue that yes, it can. If the only people who are interested in using the website are those who block analytics - and, given the demographic of a niche search engine, it doesn't sound entirely implausible - then there's no telling how the 99.99% splits into bots and nerds.

oefrha3• 4 years ago

Not every "nerd" use a blocker. I know many who don't. Some want to support the sites they visit; some want to see the web as it is for most people; some say their mental filters are so well developed that ads don't bother them; etc.

Xylakant• 4 years ago

You could guesstimate by checking the IP address - blocks assigned to residential users are likely humans, blocks assigned to cloud providers etc. likely bots.

asddubs2• 4 years ago

even if there's 99 people blocking analytics for every person who doesn't, the figure is still 99%

scambier3• 4 years ago

If you self-host Plausible, it's also possible to bundle the analytics package with the website, so that there's isn't an "ad-blockable" lone request for the .js file.

https://github.com/plausible/plausible-tracker

pluc• 4 years ago

Yeah there is. I surf with JS off because of people like you.

searchableguy• 4 years ago

Not surprised. I see many startups with Head of SEO (Search engine optimization) with huge salaries now a days.

jrussbowman3• 4 years ago

It's been the same for unscatter.com for years but I've always attributed to that to me not having a real marketing strategy or even sticking with the ones I've tried to start.

mywaifuismeta2• 4 years ago

That's really interesting... and sad. For what it's worth, I've noticed comment bots dramatically increase over the last year too. They have always been there, but looking at Reddit, YouTube, etc, now there seem to be 10x more than there were a few years earlier. Even on HN it has gotten worse.

cbozeman• 4 years ago

Is there a browser plug-in or some other piece of software that can filter, or highlight, which posts / comments are likely made by bots?

BuyMyBitcoins• 4 years ago

On two occasions I’ve read one of my comments here on HN copied and posted on Reddit. The user profiles that copied my comments in seemed like they were run by a real person but the rest of their posts might have all been scraped as well.

I only found out because I just so happened to be looking at the comments on a related news story and quickly realized the post sounded strangely familiar. I’m sure most of us here have had our comments copied without our knowledge.

larsrc• 4 years ago

Google puts a _lot_ of effort into avoiding SEO spam, but it's a red queen problem.

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

Spammers badly need spam-free content so they can mix some legitimate links with the junk they spew.

One great Black Hat SEO trick is to find where your competitors are getting clean links and insert your own links there so they do your spamming for you.

closedloop1293• 4 years ago

Why does the mixing work? Shouldn't Google and Bing know what the original content is and automatically identify the sites that are copies?

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

Here's an example.

If I have (say) 15 affiliate marketing sites, I might make a link aggregator site that looks a bit like Hacker News. Except I won't make just one, I might make 30 of them.

These might subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds and randomly select articles, maybe 10% of the links on those sites go to my affiliate sites.

If you can inject spam into those RSS feeds that system I describe would amplify it and this could have effects ranging from: you are using my marketing machine to promote your content to my sites getting really obnoxious and getting blocked.

----

"Duplicate Detection" is a necessary technology for web search because s̶h̶e̶e̶people copy themselves and other people without bound. It cuts both ways because Google and Bing have no sure way to know which one is the copy and which is the original. So (1) they aren't completely efficient at removing duplicates and (2) duplicate detection can be turned into a weapon against you, just like that link aggregator.

FargaColora4• 4 years ago

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!).

I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there.

If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc.

The general Internet is dead: it's just legacy content and spam.

If you think it's bad for you, imagine what it is like for Google Search! Their entire business is indexing a medium which no longer has any relevancy. People complain that Google no longer delivers good results. But what can Google do? The "good content" is no longer available for them to index.

Want to become rich? Make a search engine which indexes the fresh relevant data from the big siloed websites, and ignores the general dead Internet.

mywaifuismeta2• 4 years ago

I no longer see Google as a neutral "search engine" the way it used to be. Now it's just another company that owns and promotes certain types of content, no different from reddit. For some things Google has the best content, for some things Twitter or Reddit have the best content.

maxwelldone• 4 years ago

Back in 2000s Google used to be the place for any type of search (IIRC).

Now, I've been conditioned to use it only for specific use cases, mostly for convenience. Some examples include:

1. Anything programming related (searching for man pages, error codes etc) is straightforward. (I do have some UBO filters to exclude SO copycats)

2. Utility stuff like currency conversion, finding time in another city, weather etc.

Where Google has really fallen behind is in multimedia search. Not sure if it's due to copyright issues or not but Bing and Yandex provide way better service in this regard.

Not to mentions the "reddit" suffix I need to add to any search that even remotely calls for public opinion. In many cases, Google is just a shortcut to take me to the relevant subreddit.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

I find one of the best ways to find interesting content on specific subjects using Google is now to start blocking all their top returns (a lot of SEO spam). This is somewhat tedious (lots of -site:seospam.com) and Google doesn't like automated queries. However, a few rounds of this often turns up interesting content down low in the search results. Just don't take what's on offer on page one of search results, basically.

Where it's gotten really bad is on news searches as Google either now has some kind of shitlist of independent news sites that it won't allow to show op on, for example, site:youtube.com searches - or, it's filtered through a guest list. It's hard to tell which strategy they're using, but news is definitely being heavily filtered based on very dubious propaganda-smelling agendas.

dixego• 4 years ago

Google is an advertising company. It has been for a good while.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

Interesting thought. I just went though my browser history and realised that almost every time I use google search, I already know what website I want, I just don’t know the exact link/page. I’ll use google because the search on stack overflow or reddit sucks but I know I’m looking for a page on one particular site.

Pelam• 4 years ago

I realized this too. I disabled search from address bar and started bookmarking everything even remotely sane I see. I often add a few personal keywords to the bookmark bar.

It is starting to pay dividends. Instead of weird stuff thrown up by google when I type in something, I get the "oh yeah, that was the page" from a short list of bookmarks shown to match the words.

npilk• 4 years ago

I had the same realization and ended up setting up a simple Cloudflare script to automatically do an “I’m Feeling Lucky” style search to return the first result: https://notes.npilk.com/custom-search

matheusmoreira6• 4 years ago

The internet itself is probably gonna die soon anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones, all with heavy filtering at the borders.

I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.

kmlx• 4 years ago

I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks

i think it already has.

the Great Firewall of China is the classic example, but I think the trend started in the west with the Right to be forgotten/right to erasure in Europe, and subsequent HTTP Status 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons. GDPR just further cemented the split between Europe and the rest, and the new DMA & DSA regulation in the European Union finally makes it clear. The writing is of course on the wall, so countries like India or Australia aren't too far behind. Places like California also have their own "right to be forgotten", and I'm sure the US will not be left behind for too long before we see regulation further splitting their internet from the RoW. And I don't think the RoW will hold off much longer till it also splits into multiple big blocks. It's the start of the new "nationalist" internet, and I'm sure we'll all be poorer because of it.

7sidedmarble• 4 years ago

The networking may have been open like that, but I'm not sure the content ever was. It seems to me like a lot of internet users consume mainly the content of sites from their country. Kind of hard to blame them when that content is probably going to download fastest. But the language barrier has also kept the internet from becoming truly global.

dreen• 4 years ago

I think this was inevitable all along, something similar happened to radio if I'm not mistaken.

However, the good news is that we will never stop reinventing everything. The real value of the old internet was showing us what is possible.

Whiteshadow12• 4 years ago

This made me sad, the optimist in me believes that some alternative will be built, that could take us back to those days. Honestly I do feel for most of my life I experienced an American Internet mostly (From South Africa), as long as one can still hop from one internet to another, in as simple a manner as possible it might not as bad as it could be.

cesarb• 4 years ago

I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones

That's exactly the world in which the Internet grew. There were multiple segregated national and sub-national networks, and the Internet was built as a means to interconnect them. After some time, the Internet protocols ended up being used even within these networks, but that was not originally the case. And even today, there are still things like the AS (Autonomous System) concept which permeates the core of the top-level Internet routing protocols, which still reflect the Internet being a "network of networks" instead of a single unified network.

That's why I'm not too worried about the Internet fragmenting; we've seen this before. What happens next is gateways between the networks, and there are already shades of these in the VPN providers which allow one to connect as if one were located in a different network, often from a different country.

Hnrobert42• 4 years ago

As you describe this, it makes me think about how populations tend to migrate to cities and away from rural areas. There’s even a parallel to white flight in the emerging popularity of the chan/gab fora.

black_puppydog• 4 years ago

These discussions always make me recal Jacob Applebaum. Think of him what you want, but this statement of his really stuck with me at the time. Paraphrasing:

The real dark-net is facebook. Everything that goes in there never comes out again and is basically invisible to the world, except if you join facebook yourself.

My own prime example of that used to be pinterest: it seems to be a 100% sink in the directed graph of internet links. But since Applebaum stated this, instagram (also facebook of course) is trying hard to push pinterest off that particular throne.

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

to me this is also discord - which seems to have become the chose alternative tk online forums for many communities and basically hides what used to be the public face of those communities.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

I don't believe the WWW internet is dead; there's still millions of webpages being made and published every day. However, the traffic numbers are skewed in favor of the big socials and aggregators; I wouldn't be surprised if the 80/20 rule applies there.

pnutjam2• 4 years ago

There seems to be a tendancy towards video that undercuts the "old internet". I prefer instructions in a text or list format, but that's almost impossible to find for things like, changing the headlight bulb on my traverse.

1. turn the wheel so it is pointed hard in the direction of the bulb you are changing.

2. remove the hex screws from the shroud in the wheel well

3. pull the shroud down, it's pretty flexible plastic.

4. reach up and change the bulb. The wires are a bit short so you might need to get both hands in there. I have big hands and I'm able to do it.

---- There are innumerable videos explaining this process, but very few text directions.

DebtDeflation• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, correct. The average Internet user accesses it via a phone, not a desktop, laptop, or even tablet these days. Most of that access is through apps, not a browser. To the extent that a user is looking for a factoid answer and does a search, a Google Knowledge Graph result with a Wikipedia link is probably enough in most cases. If they want a technical question answered, Stack Exchange; a product review, Reddit; nearby restaurants with reviews, Google Maps; etc.

CTDOCodebases• 4 years ago

People are doing this already. You just have to include the site name in the search on google e.g reddit. Search on these platforms is often broken.

marginalia_nu15• 4 years ago

I built my search engine in part to explore whether this was actually true, and I don't think it actually is.

There's still a lot of organic human-made content still out there, possibly more than ever, it's just not able to compete with the SEO industry that completely displaces it from Google and social media.

fifticon• 4 years ago

I second that independent sites exist - I maintain my own website on a personally run server. There are dozens of us! to quote a quaint phrase.

api• 4 years ago

All open systems are destroyed by spam once they become popular enough to be profitable targets. This will eventually happen to the Fediverse too. If there is money to be made pissing all over the commons, the commons will be pissed all over.

It even happens to proprietary silos if they are too open. Look at how many bots and spammers infest social media. Propaganda and disinformation can also be considered a form of spam.

I realize this sounds cynical but don’t shoot the messenger. It’s just something I’ve learned watching the Internet evolve since the middle 1990s. Spam eats everything it can.

IMHO the future is enclaves and invite only communities. The Internet is a dark forest.

indigochill• 4 years ago

How do you surface organic human content? I happen to linger around the fediverse/tildeverse sphere where I see organic content from people I personally have a direct (digital) connection to (and I started self-hosting my music after Epic bought Bandcamp), but I'm not clear on how I'd go about digging that kind of stuff up in the more general case.

alxlaz• 4 years ago

This matches my findings 100%. The WWW is active and bubbling, but virtually all the cool websites I've found in the last 10 years or so came through friends, small IRC channels, or more recently through marginalia.nu :-). Google and friends are facilitators for the SEO and tracking industries, so of course they have zero interest to prioritize these things over content spam -- their whole business runs on content spam. But the WWW is as alive as it gets.

sdoering2• 4 years ago

I can only agree with my sister comment. I find this industrialized web more and more shallow and taxing to use.

While professionally I need to help (smaller, local) clients to reach their audiences I become more and more weary.

It is like walking through a supermarket with industrialized fast convenience food shouting in bright colors and advertising while ultimately not nourishing me like slow, real food could.

I am still looking for this digital slow food movement.

ColinHayhurst5• 4 years ago

Agreed.

If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just legacy content and spam.

The "general" Internet is not dead. Though if you just want to participate in just Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord you might well think that.

Users of marginalia (author above), Mojeek (disclosure: CEO) and others [0] are well aware that there are riches of organic human-made content; from years back and new. Yes, a lot of noise too, which Google has a bigger (SEO) struggle to compete against. But still there is good and different content available.

To find good content, using search, you need to use "search" engines which enable discovery, as Google used to do so. I stress the "search" as the emphasis of Google, Bing and thus their syndicates is increasingly on being "answer" engines.

[0] https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

pmontra• 4 years ago

I take myself as an example.

People that know me and don't meet me regularly might know the URL of my web site and might care to look at it once per year and check if there is something new. Usually pictures and tales from holidays. Covid made those holidays less memorable so I didn't make any update since fall 2019. People that meet me regularly don't need that website, I'm telling them the tales first hand and showing them the pictures without being obnoxious. I guess that this website is a target for your search engine except it's not in English and your search engine seems to want English search phrases.

I don't have anything of value to share on a public chat like Twitter and I don't have an ego to pretend I do. I also don't use Facebook anymore. I go there once per year to like the messages that wish me happy birthday. I think it's polite to do so. All my media production is on WhatsApp or Telegram in group chats with people I know in real life.

If I really cared about producing content for the world I'd probably be using Twitter, Medium or the fad of the year and they'd take care of my SEO (do they?) or I'd be trying to score points on StackOverflow.

To recap: I never intended to compete on SEO. I'm really OK that my website is only for friends and spreads by word of mouth. It probably never did, I bet it's been on a flatline since I created it 20+ years ago.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

And who uses your search? I had never heard of "you" until just now. And there is the problem with "new" search engines. Unless you can come up with what would have to be one of the greatest ad campaigns the world has ever seen, no significant number of users will know you exist. Where does the money to pay for that ad campaign come from? How will a search engine generate money to stay relevant? Once people see you becoming relevant, they will figure out how to game your system. It's just the nature of the beast. I don't think I'm being overly cynical about this either.

kodah• 4 years ago

Agreed, the general internet is not dead, but the majority of internet users are on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc.

From my perspective, we onboarded a lot (if not most) people to the internet after 2007 (the explosion of social media). People sticking to big sites really speaks to an inability to explore the larger internet and a lack of knowing why you would even want to.

Vladimof• 4 years ago

I added it to my list of search engines on Firefox... your favicon is really small, that's on purpose?

captainmuon• 4 years ago

But Twitter, Reddit, HN, and most other such places are just websites and can be indexed fine. Same with Wikipedia, which is very much a silo (they don't have regular links in text in the hypertext spirit, but only footnotes).

Facebook and Instagram are more of a walled garden, like Quora, but there is a lot of junk there anyway.

It's sad for the WWW, but I don't really think it is a fundamental problem for search engines. In fact Twitter for example gives a direct pipe to Google. If you tweet something, it is immediately findable. Similar for StackExchange, but there I think the site is so "small" that Google can afford to just continuously index it.

ratww5• 4 years ago

Twitter and Reddit still can be indexed, but they've also become increasingly hard to use without an account. Reddit doesn't let you fully expand threads when you're unlogged. Twitter limits the amount of things you can read and shows a modal. Both of them heavily limit usage on mobile devices without installing an app.

Sure, an account is free but might require giving information you don't want to give. Twitter asks me for a phone number a few minutes after creating an account, even if I don't post anything). Reddit at least lets you skip giving an email.

Sure, there are workarounds such as using lite versions (old Reddit, mobile Twitter), but that's not known to all people coming from a search engine.

It feels as if HN are the only one that's not a partially walled garden yet (and Wikipedia of course).

TheRealDunkirk2• 4 years ago

And isn't great to get a link to Reddit or Twitter, and you click the link, and try to navigate to the comments for context or the answer, and you go to click the link to expand it, and then you get a demand to log in and install their app? Don't talk about walled gardens and not include Reddit or Twitter just because they let you look at one brick before demanding their tax.

lkxijlewlf• 4 years ago

If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc.

Interesting. When I search for something topical I search those sites using Google because al(most) (I don't use some like FB and insta) all those sites have really shitty search.

shortformblog2• 4 years ago

I think this is a tad reductive, but I will say that we sure let a lot of big companies convince a huge portion of the population to create all of their content on platforms that they have no real control over.

The problem is, many of them didn’t realize this was a problem until recently.

That said, plenty of exciting stuff is happening outside of the walled garden, as long as you know how to find it.

Gravityloss• 4 years ago

And not only did this happen already over a decade ago, a lot of the current internet users have never known anything else.

We had a discussion with coworkers and somebody mentioned irc. Explaining to younger colleagues what it was and that it was not a product of a company, but operators had servers that formed a network, and it was more like infrastructure. Felt weird.

NicoJuicy• 4 years ago

The big siloed websites are just indexes of fresh content though.

With a generic way to place comments on it.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc.

Maybe we’re searching for different content, but I disagree. While Google results are not without noise, I think it’s a huge exaggeration to suggest it’s useless. I still regularly find quality results from a quick skim of the first or second page of Google results.

Meanwhile places like Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News are full of very strong opinions that feel truthy, but are mostly noise. Unless you go in with enough baseline knowledge to filter out 9/10 underinformed comments to dig out the 10% who actually have direct knowledge of the subject and aren’t just parroting some version of something they read from other comments, skipping straight to social sites becomes a source of misinformation.

lysecret• 4 years ago

I think this is a very "consumer focused" take. Yes. A lot of interesting people data is now "locked" behind these aggregators and platforms (and also hard to handle because of GDPR). But most interesting company data is still out there.

simion314• 4 years ago

This is not true, maybe for a subset of Internet users.

For example you have Wikis and forums. Wikis are good for communities that are passionate about a topic and they collaborate on buidling content for their passion. Reddit is a valid alternative to forums but if the community s older and has members that are technical competent then they usually have the forum customized for their purpose and the forum will continue to exist , especially if you want to avoid some third party censorship.

I never ever search for something and found answers on Facebook, sometimes very rare I find something that points to Instagram blogs/posts but never Facebook.

Probably depends on your location and what you search for, so it might be possible that 99% of your Internet consumption is satisfied by 5-10 websites.

jrussbowman3• 4 years ago

"Want to become rich? Make a search engine which indexes the fresh relevant data from the big siloed websites, and ignores the general dead Internet."

Did that to some degree. Unscatter.com pulls from reddit and twitter to source links.

I found reddit only created an echo chamber bubble of obvious bias and twitter only diluted it a little.

baxtr• 4 years ago

I am not so sure...

I think what happened is this: the WWW was everything back in the days. But in the "old days," only 10% of all people were online, the web elite. Then, AOL came, and the rest came online slowly but surely. The so-called "mainstream" people were no geeks, and these people were "just" ordinary people. Almost all were captured by what you call "big websites".

Now, we see the 100% being dominated by the 90%. That's why "Google results are bad". Bad for us! Not maybe (most probably) not for them.

nl2• 4 years ago

Eternal September was Sep 1993. AOL hit the internet in March 1994.

Netscape didn't launch until December 1994 (and the WWW was nothing before that. I subscribed to a mailing list with new sites that were released and I'd visit most new websites on the internet on most days with the Cello browser in my uni labs most days).

AOL users have been there since the beginning of the WWW.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

psyc• 4 years ago

Based on my observations over the past year, I’m certain that Google and Bing choose not to show us most of the web anymore.

I usually find what I’m looking for. It just takes literally three orders of magnitude longer than it used to for the same kind of stuff. I used to use Google a lot to jog my memory about various things I vaguely remembered. Type a few associative words and snippets, press Enter, done. Google’s useless for that now.

If you’re looking for hot pop shit in trendy publications, things to buy, commercial services to subscribe to - G has you covered. That’s what they do now.

stackbutterflow• 4 years ago

I think you're generalizing your own behavior. I regularly use google to search for topics that cross my mind and I end up on many websites that are not one the giants in your list. It's a fun activity. If people stick to the same 10 websites that's on them. Nothing prevents you from exploring the web.

MockObject• 4 years ago

Nothing prevents you from exploring the web.

What prevents you from exploring the web is you can't find but the same 10 sites through search engines.

mrtksn• 4 years ago

It has been dead for a while now and the whole society feels it globally. Things were getting so good then things become horrible and whoever cracks the path to the goods stuff again will find great riches at the end of the path.

dotnet002• 4 years ago

I agree that this seems way too reductive. I was recently reflecting on this and noticed that I constantly run across new blogs and sites whenever trying to learn something. I just don't usually pay much attention to the site name in the way that I remember HN, Reddit, Twitter etc.

So, while I would agree that some aspects of the old internet are dead (like 'small' ~1000 user forums focused on specific topics having largely been replaced by generally inferior subreddits and discord servers), I think it hasn't gotten as bad as you're making it out to be.

jerf• 4 years ago

"I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there."

That is not the Dead Internet Theory. That's just something anyone can see by looking at the world.

The Dead Internet Theory is that the Internet is already an echo chamber custom fed to you by a collection of bots and other such things, and that a lot of the "people" you think you're interacting with are already, today, faked. You're basically in a constructed echo chamber designed only with the interests of the creators of that chamber in mind, using the powerful social cues of homo sapiens effectively against you.

In particular, those silos aren't where people are communicating. Those silos are where you think you're communicating.

It is obviously not entirely true. When we physically meet friends, sometimes topics wander to "Did you see what I posted on Facebook?" So far, we've not caught Facebook actively forging posts from our real-life friends that we physically know. (Though we have caught them failing to disseminate posts in what seems to be a distinctly slanted manner.)

I am also not terribly convinced that the bots have mastered long-form content like you see on HN. I think we've had some try, and while they can sort of pass, they seem to expend so much effort on merely "passing" that they don't have much left over to actually drive the conversation. HN probably still requires real humans to manipulate things.

Where I do seriously wonder about this theory is Twitter. AI has progressed to the point that short-form content like that can be effectively generated and driven in a certain direction. There's been some chatter on the far-out rumor mills about just how bot-infested Twitter may be, how many people think they have thousands of followers, even having interacted with some of them as "people", and in fact may only have dozens of flesh-and-blood humans following them, if that. Stay tuned, this one is developing.

(Note that while this could be "a big plan", it is also a possible outcome of many groups independently coming to the conclusion that a Twitter bot horde could be useful. A few hundred from X trying to nudge you one way, a few hundred from Y trying to nudge you another, another few thousand from Z trying to nudge you yet another, before you know it, the vast vast majority of everyone's "followers" is bots bots bots, and there was no grand plan to produce that result. It just so happens that Twitter's ancient decision to be dedicated to short-form content, with no particular real-world connection to the conversation participants, where everyone is isolated on their own feed (even if that is shared in some ways) made it the first place where this could happen. Things with real-world connections, things where everyone is in the same "area" like an HN conversation, and long-form content will all be three things that will be harder for AIs to manipulate. Twitter is like the agar dish for this sort of thing, by its structure.)

thesuitonym2• 4 years ago

(Though we have caught them failing to disseminate posts in what seems to be a distinctly slanted manner.)

I haven't seen this, but I'd be interested in reading about it, if you have a link!

ftkftk• 4 years ago

I agree - I don't believe that there is a grand master plan of a conspiratorial or other nature. I think it is simply, as you stated, a co-evolution of independent actors.

boplicity• 4 years ago

No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there.

Really? We make our living running a small web based publication; around 40k readers a month. I know of many other sites like this. Google, and other search engines, depends on niche websites to provide quality search results. Without sites like ours, the internet would truly be dead, and search would be mostly useless. Our "traffic sources" come from a mix of Facebook, Search, Reddit, etc, in addition to our many loyal readers.

Others in our niche are producing blog spam, which looks nearly identical to people who aren't experts in the field, but we have real experts, fact checkers, etc, as part of our production process. This is a big problem: These low quality websites get similar rankings to our own, which does make it much harder for people to get quality information via search. (Hence the general shift towards trusting social recommendations, such as from Reddit.)

In short, the WWW is alive and well, it's just buried under a bunch of #$#$%.

rchaud2• 4 years ago

Our "traffic sources" come from a mix of Facebook, Search, Reddit, etc, in addition to our many loyal readers.

40k/mo is a pretty good number for an independent website. As a word of warning though, relying on social media reach is a dangerous game, as there is anecdotal evidence that tweets with outbound links don't get as many impressions as those that link to in-site content, like another Twitter post.

As for Facebook, well, there's a good comic from The Oatmeal (enormously popular on FB back in 2010) that talks about what happened in the long run:

https://twitter.com/Oatmeal/status/923250055540219904

rchaud2• 4 years ago

Want to become rich? Make a search engine which indexes the fresh relevant data from the big siloed websites, and ignores the general dead Internet.

That would be a great service, but it certainly wouldn't make you rich. Where's the money going to come from? Google got rich because they acquired an ads platform (DoubleClick) and an analytics platform (Urchin) and started monetizing the vast amounts of data they had. That was years after Google had established goodwill as the best search engine.

big_blind3• 4 years ago

I use beta search engines. On kagi.com and you.com you can preference and filter top sites. There's also no advertising on either. I've just stopped using Google altogether and its improved search so much.

jspaetzel• 4 years ago

This is so incredibly false, I've been working on a project for the last six months and MoM I've seen steady increase in usage. Tbh much much higher usage then I expected. Most users find my site via Google or Facebook however they are looking for content that's not in those silos and have no problems leaving them.

If you have high quality content and you get it indexed properly by Google, users will come.

There are reasons users are not using your website.

1. It's not solving a problem people have.

2. Users can't find it.

Who, in their right mind searches for search engines? Nobody I know.

If you want users you have to go out and get them (literally pound the pavement and talk to people) or create a LOT more content ironically, so they can find your site on the search engines they are using today.

throw10920• 4 years ago

I agree: the WWW Internet is dead

I've heard this claim a lot, with 0 supporting evidence. Do you have any?

My own experience is that there are thousands of content-rich, high-quality blogs still being written by real humans, because I regularly find and bookmark new ones weekly, without even looking for them, so: please provide evidence for this claim that runs counter to my lived experience.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

Doesn't this site, and all of the content it links to, pretty much disprove your theory?

Yes, sure, I often do go to the "top sites" when searching for content, but I still usually start at Google. And, despite all the SEO spam, Google still does a fairly decent of landing me on, for example, the appropriate Wikipedia page, Stackoverflow post, travel site, etc.

dageshi• 4 years ago

I agree with you to an extent. The web is less useful than it used to be. BUT I would say a lot of that usefulness has diverted into youtube. There are people who would previously have made sites who are making youtube videos instead which of course is owned by google.

altairprime• 4 years ago

If you want to be rich, solve search without full-text indexing of sites. Pagerank only ever worked because of human curation of webrings. Full-text search made is easier to find content, and opened the door for spammers. The only viable route forward for search will be to replace full-text indexing with human curation, somehow. Solve how to scale that up instead, so that when everyone else realizes we need it for the health of the Web, you’re ready.

soheil3• 4 years ago

To a fish the world is made of water and there can't possibly be anything else worthwhile. This is more indicative of how you spend your time online vs reality.

ouid• 4 years ago

Google is still pretty good at searching reddit. Maybe reddit can acquire them.

big_blind3• 4 years ago

site:reddit just is the best search engine at this point. I still don't like Google though.

derefr• 4 years ago

Make a search engine which indexes the fresh relevant data from the big siloed websites, and ignores the general dead Internet

I don’t understand why Google themselves don’t do this. LinkedIn v. hiQ demonstrated that they won’t get in trouble for scraping users’ subjective views of data within these silos and then stitching them together to form a cohesive whole. So where’s the effort to do so? It seems like the obvious step.

samstave• 4 years ago

This MUST be the reason that they threw their purchase of Postini in the garbage and my GMAIL INBOX is filled with spam, and my "social" and "promotions" tabs dont filter....

GMAIL is garbage now, I literally use it as my spam email any more. Which sucks because I have had it for a really long time.

Annecdote on Yahoo! Mail ; years ago I wrote to yahoo support asking when I created my Yahoo Mail account (i'd had it from the 90s when it was very early available...)

And support told me that they couldnt tell me when my account was created as that was *proprietary company information*

So I deleted my Yahoo account. Im about to DL all my gmail and do the same.

omoikane• 4 years ago

I think the Dead Internet Theory bit is just a bait to get more comments. It's a bit of a stretch to conclude that the internet is mostly robots just because one website sees mostly robots. This extrapolation would be convincing if that one website is a high ranking website that sees a lot of traffic, but searchmysite.net does not appear to be one of the top websites.

hombre_fatal• 4 years ago

I don't get how TFA shows evidence of the Dead Internet Theory just because their site manages to attract ~zero users.

Just host a <form><textarea><button></form> at an IP address and notice it's just spambots submitting it with backlinks, not actual users. Doesn't mean the internet is dead nor that the indieweb is dead.

It doesn't really show anything other than the only people able to extract value from your creation are the spammers.

Jenk• 4 years ago

If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc.

High chances you will find a link to an external site over content actually on those big named sites though, right? That tells us the organic web isn't dead, it's just hard to discover/navigate - because of SEO wars, most probably... The problem isn't the lack of content, it's the number of shitty spammy sites standing in your way of the sites you actually want to see. Like a sleazy salesman trying to direct you to the crap laden three wheeled rust bucket when you were heading toward the family sedans.

heavyset_go• 4 years ago

I was once on this bandwagon, but I think it was just confirmation bias reflecting the way I used the internet at the time. The non-siloed internet is bigger than the pre-siloed internet ever was.

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

If you think it's bad for you, imagine what it is like for Google Search! Their entire business is indexing a medium which no longer has any relevancy.

Google was the one (among many) that killed it - so I am not gonna shed any tears.

Shinchy• 4 years ago

I think you're thinking too narrowly about general chit chat content. E-commerce for example is still very much in the function of using your own website. As I would say is documentation, e-learning, saas, company information, etc. It's a more purposeful web.

What is dead though is the general blog like content and community platforms of old, the era of Wordpress blogs, forums and hobbyist websites is certainly gone.

Schroedingersat2• 4 years ago

If they wanted good content, they shouldn't have coerced everyone with good content into turning it into illegible seo spam in order to appear in the top 10 pages. The writing was on the wall the first time a recipe site had to start writing stupid stories about their dog.

ajnin2• 4 years ago

This made me curious to try that search engine so I typed "electronic music box" (first thing that came to mind). As far as I can tell none or the 10+ pages of results include all those 3 words. I mean, you might not have any relevant sites in your database (likely if there are only 1000 sites or so as another of your blog posts imply), and I understand you want to show some result to the user, but if I want irrelevant links I might as well go to google.com...

thehodge• 4 years ago

Yeah same, I searched for Leeds grand theatre and the top result is something titled "June 2012 – Sam's Blog' which just mentions the word grand.

lubesGordi• 4 years ago

What the heck is an 'electronic music box'? I personally wouldn't expect those three words to show up on any sites served by a small search engine.

ajnin2• 4 years ago

It's a music box that produces sound electronically, as opposed to traditional mechanical ones. I don't think it is that foreign of a concept. It might be present, or not, in the search results, it depends entirely on the niche and I could not now which it was by just reading the blog post. Anyway that was not really the point of my test.

marginalia_nu15• 4 years ago

I had to put my search engine behind Cloudflare to deal with this. Like the volume grew to about 10x the traffic I saw sitting at the front page of Hacker News for a full week.

marginalia_nu15• 4 years ago

This is the rate of rejected HTTP requests I'm seeing at this point: https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/spam.png

Real search traffic is about half that.

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Thanks V. I'm seeing a similar number of problem search requests (although nowhere near as many real search requests:-), so it is probably the same "SEO practitioners" running the same "scraping footprints" against different search engines around the same time.

I was kind-of hoping that somewhere in this discussion there would be an "And the answer to your problem is...", but I suppose it is a very specific problem which only a search engine would encounter. I think the Cloudflare solution you have is probably the best to block the requests as early as possible. The reverse proxy config[0] I've got seems to be mostly holding out for now though.

[0] https://github.com/searchmysite/searchmysite.net/issues/55

Teandw• 4 years ago

This guy throws multiple reasons/conspiracies out there on why the website is really struggling to gain literally any sort of traction. Web is all bots, search engines not promoting competitors and being drowned out by SEO spam, yet he's failing to see the most obvious reason... the reason nearly all websites don't gain traction...

Because it's a bad website. It provides no value to the user. I put in a few search terms and had no relevant search results back. What use is a search engine that can't find what I'm searching for?

Maybe if that was improved he may see traction.

Jleagle• 4 years ago

I'm getting lots of `No results found for query = xxx.`

rightbyte• 4 years ago

That sounds like a feature actually, being honest about no hits.

honkdaddy• 4 years ago

Searching for Astral Codex Ten, a popular, well-written, non-spammy blog which I would expect is indexed...

Returns only results in which _other_ bloggers are referencing ACX. Consider me as one of the datapoints that arrived from HN and likely won't be back, I'm afraid.

wccrawford• 4 years ago

I just search Kagi, Google, and DDG for "Astral Codex Ten" and it was the first result on each.

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Thanks for your feedback. The idea was for people to submit sites they like, and search sites other people have liked. I've submitted Astral Codex Ten, and that site is now indexed for the benefit of others.

native_samples• 4 years ago

Well, it's worse than that. The whole schtick is that it's only pure, real content by folksy people like us. The top reason to use it on the about page is:

Indexes only user-submitted sites with a moderation layer on top, for a community-based approach to content curation, rather than indexing the entire internet with all of its spam, "search engine optimisation" and "click-bait" content.

So I tried searching [kotlin] and got 123 results ...

https://searchmysite.net/search/?q=kotlin

... of which the 9th result is SEO spam! It reads:

PersonalSit.es | Yes we got hot and fresh sites https://personalsit.es/ ... Shandilyahttps://msfjarvis.devTagsandroid, kotlin, rust Go to feed Go to siteradoslawkoziel.plradoslawkoziel.pl ...

That looks like junk to me. How is that possible if what the developer says is true, that it's all verified and pre-moderated?

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Thanks for your feedback. It is just the home page which is moderated before indexing (and reviewed annually). When https://personalsit.es/ was listed it looked legitimate, but agreed the results for that site look infected with spam now. I've found at least one other site today where the home page and blog look genuinely legitimate, but which has a complete spam subdomain, quite possibly the victim of a subdomain takeover attack by spammers. I've delisted both. Unfortunately it isn't an easy task trying to defeat a vast army of well funded spammers in your spare time!

pwiercinski• 4 years ago

I guess the use-case just isn't that popular. It's a good website if you want to learn what some devs are up to, but barely anyone cares about that. Most people use search engines to find answers to their questions and Search My Site just doesn't work like that.

fortran77• 4 years ago

I found a few pro-terrorism sites here. I don't think it's the OPs purpose, but he's being duped by the few users that do look for sites like this where they can add a "curated link" to their ISIS or Hezbollah or Hamas site with a slick facade.

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Thanks for your feedback. If you can drop me a note I'll remove those sites - it is against the Terms of Use at https://searchmysite.net/pages/terms/ (not that spammers, terrorists, etc. care about complying with a Terms of Use). I think legitimate looking home pages as a front to other non-legitimate content is a genuine problem this model doesn't solve (also noting that some of those home pages may even be genuinely legitimate but have been hacked e.g. via a subdomain takeover).

lukev• 4 years ago

I second this. Don't get me wrong, I applaud the concept and the effort, but this implementation isn't quite there.

I searched for "document management system comparison" since I am currently in the process of selecting one for our legal team at work. Some on-the-ground reports from real users would be hugely valuable. But this is the classic example of where Google utterly fails; document management is a 100 billion industry and there are absolutely no search results which are not SEO, marketing copy, or astroturfed listicles with nearly zero value.

Unfortunately, this website returned even less relevant results. Not a single result pertained to document management at all; instead it returned random matches on words like "system" and "management."

Whoever solves this problem could definitely unseat Google as the go-to search engine for most people. So it's a big prize. But it's also a super hard socio-technical problem, requiring incredibly sophisticated and powerful tech in a highly adversarial environment. However, regrettably, it looks like this attempt hasn't even got the basic search tech down.

freediver• 4 years ago

Typed this search into Kagi and got:

- This results from an old site https://www.scanstore.com/Scanning_Software/Document_Managem... not sure if still relevant

- A bunch of discussions from reddit and other forums (probably best lead)

- One research paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.3131.pdf

- Listicles grouped togeter so you can skip them

- The noncommercial filter gave a few more good results, but it seems like there is not much 'good' content written on this topic

I would definetely not call all Kagi results fantastic, but it does seem to be better than Google. We are trying hard to solve the problem of the nonsense on the web (Kagi founder here).

marginalia_nu15• 4 years ago

Is a comparison of document management systems something you expect actually find, as something written by humans? I wouldn't write such an article, I don't know who would.

The only people who seem to be writing these types of comparison articles are spammers.

I typed this reply without checking, but I checked now, and yeah -- if you google "document management system comparison", you get ads for document management systems, and search engine spam. That's hardly helpful.

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Hi, "this guy" here:-) If people come to a site but don't come back then it is reasonable to conclude that "it's a bad website", but as the blog entry put it "without any real users in the first place it is hard to gauge whether people like it or not".

Note also that it isn't intended to be a general purpose search engine, but a niche search engine to try and find some of the fun and interesting content, e.g. relating to hobbies and interests, which used to be at the core of the web but which can be difficult to find anywhere nowadays.

soheil3• 4 years ago

How exactly is a "general purpose search engine" different than a "search engine to try and find some of the fun and interesting content"?

CWuestefeld2• 4 years ago

Whether or not his site is meeting his goals is his business.

I find this a really interesting post, because I'm also dealing with excessive bot traffic (it's generally about half of my overall), and specifically how to salvage analytics data when there's so much noise. Seeing what other people are doing to combat it helps me, regardless of whether you might think of them as successful or not.

status200• 4 years ago

I searched "best dress shoes reddit" as a test, and just got a random list of websites that had the word "shoes" on the page somewhere, including a Dinosaur Comic from 2008.

So... yeah. Won't exactly be my first choice of search engine in the future.

_tom_3• 4 years ago

It doesn't index sites like Reddit, so, not too surprising Reddit wasn't in the result.

matt_heimer• 4 years ago

Looking at the blog (https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/milestone-1000th-site-in...) I think very little of the internet is in this search engine.

Its difficult to gauge the quality of the engine itself at this point with so little content in it.

What I can say is that even remotely presenting the system as a general purpose internet search engine like the UI from https://searchmysite.net/ does is going to give people the wrong idea and make them think the system is bad. To start with I'd suggest adding the number of sites indexed to the main search page.

I also think that the https://searchmysite.net/ portal will likely never be a destination. I'd suggest trying to promote it differently, offer a service service for OG internet sites, they opt-in to the service because they want a search widget they can embed on their site that has filter to search just that site or all OG sites. Having website categories would also help so people could search across tech blogs, or aquarium, or bowling sites, etc. Basically the old web ring idea but powered by search instead of just browsing a list.

Since there is a chicken and egg scenario - What you really need are people that think Google sucks that are invested in a niche and want to build a search ring out. The "only sites submitted by verified site owners" restriction needs to go, you want good curation but this is just too restrictive. I also think "downranks results containing adverts" is too restrictive, switch that to "downranks results containing excessive adverts and SEO spam".

thelittleone• 4 years ago

Complete SEO noob here. Can someone help explain what these bots are trying to achieve? There is mention in the blog that they're trying to uncover ad free content.

TheRealDunkirk2• 4 years ago

If there's a game to play, people will write software to play it for their profit.

I guess it's back to web rings.

freeone3000• 4 years ago

Well, the first two links loaded for a search for "magic the gathering" are 404s. The "Random" link at the bottom 403s. The search engine feels broken.

Auguste• 4 years ago

I'm disappointed that Search My Site isn't seeing many legitimate viewers.

Just wanted you to know that I'm a fan. I love reading peoples personal websites, and Search My Site has been great for discoverability. I visit the Newest Pages and Browse Sites pages once or twice a week to check out the new sites being indexed.

I don't know what the answer is to the spam bots, but you do have some real visitors out there. :)

superasn• 4 years ago

To me it looks like some popular spamming software (like thebestspinner, etc) just integrated you and now everyone who is the software is now hitting your site.

The good news in this case is that's it'll be easy to spot the pattern and block it, the bad news is you're entering a never-ending cat and mouse game.

XCSme• 4 years ago

If the internet is dead, is there anything left that's "alive"? The mobile app stores are also filled with crap[0] and it seems that the ratio of spam content vs real content is getting close to infinity.

[0] https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk - 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

assemblylang• 4 years ago

There are still ways to prod out good content from the SEO spam on search engines. I wrote a google search front end that does this [0], using search operators to remove some common SEO spam.

[0] https://sayno2seo.com

buzzwords• 4 years ago

I have had very interesting conversations with people who are "casual" users of internet. They are still finding the results of the likes of Google, bing and duckduckgo perfectly suitable. Maybe it's most of us here who have different needs to what's available.

bachmeier• 4 years ago

I suppose it depends what they're looking for. If you're a homeowner looking for a service of some kind...good luck. There are domains that aren't too bad, like programming, but you should go into a search with low expectations. Anyone that remembers the early days of Google will find today's search engines to be useless in comparison.

xwdv2• 4 years ago

Will we ever see the return of hand curated directories of websites like the old days, categorized by topics and approved by human review?

saalweachter• 4 years ago

Wikipedia, maybe?

The greater problem of curation is that it doesn't scale, and you need immense human effort to survey and curate both the breadth of questions -- what's a good table saw? what aspects of Egyptian culture were exported back to Greece? is HDPE plastic safe? give me some punk music. -- and also the breadth of answers, both every website and every type of table saw.

The lesser is that you cannot curate without introducing a voice, a set of preferences that may not be universal. Tastes are not universal, you can't recommend the same band for everyone. Resources are not universal, regardless of whether the $10000 table saw is more than 100x better than the $100 table saw, it's just out of reach of most people. And needs aren't universal -- a professional cabinet maker and a DIYer making a chicken coop don't need the same saw.

There's a set of priors behind every query, and you either need to get users to frame their queries in a way that captures all of the relevant priors, or you need to create a variety of voices that capture different sets of priors and curate answers appropriate to that voice. Are you asking Norm Abrams, Monica Mangin, or Shane Wighton for a recommendation on a table saw?

xwdv2• 4 years ago

Perhaps there can be a difference between search engines for answering specific questions, and directories where one may browse a broad range of topics without any goal in particular.

closedloop1293• 4 years ago

Coincidentally, such a site was submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31387592

ColinHayhurst5• 4 years ago

Mojeek member here. We have always had a high level of spam bots; as any search engine/service will have. It's a constant battle to fend off new bots; folks can always use try out our API rather than freeloading, and some do. Many obviously do not. We are taking a look at whether things have also changed for us since mid-April 2022.

ColinHayhurst5• 4 years ago

Some evidence of an uptick here too. Historically it has been ~80%. 6 days ago we had to block 92%. Yesterday we blocked around three times that number of bot searches.

edit: the three times spike yesterday was one particular new attacker; general recent rise holds.

chairmanwow1• 4 years ago

I created a temporary email service that was being used by about 10k users / week. Then several weeks ago, the number of users started growing like crazy up to about 60k users a day. Then we checked the recent email activity and 60k / 65k emails were from a social networking site.

Seems our service was being used to create fake bot accounts. The newly created accounts were obvious fakes. Rather than deal with the issue, we just shut the service off.

DethNinja• 4 years ago

Only solution is a webring based federated search engine.

1. You just put /webring.txt to your website. It shows links to other websites with a hard limit of 100 websites.

2. To combat spam and bots, search engine does accept blocklist as an input. So other people can curate the content.

3. People can personally rank the websites they like, so webring of the said website gets ranked higher for that specific user. This can be a community effort too.

4. Search engine itself should be under a commercial license so that other people can keep building it and add ads if they want to commercialise it.

I’m too busy to spend time with this but perhaps one day I can start coding it.

I’m convinced that search engine model of early internet is just dead, webrings are the way forward.

mcv2• 4 years ago

Nice idea, but of course if it gets even slightly popular, every SEO content farm will immediately generate 10,000 sites that all list each other in their webring.txt.

iamjbn• 4 years ago

Adding to the list I have been building for very long -- "Becoming irrelevant, Google Search" -- here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cSMY5wXSKhJdMxeJEvTUJ21e...

mcv2• 4 years ago

If you're trying to boost your user numbers, I'm in. Results on topics I search for are very sparse, but it's all content I hadn't seen before, which is great.

Sounds like your search engine is not suitable as a replacement for more traditional search engines, but it might complement them very well. I'll give it a try.

As for the SEO bots: can't you simply block those?

stuff4ben• 4 years ago

Just posting here that I'm real and I'm glad I found searchmysite! After HN, Verge, Ars, Gizmodo, and some car forum, I struggle to find content I want to read. Hopefully this will allow me to continue to find something I can read as I work on solving problems at work. I find distractions help me to refocus in an odd way.

wibyweb2• 4 years ago

In late April up to now, Wiby (a small mostly unheard of search engine) began having the exact same issue. Tens of thousands of the exact same type of "powered by..." requests coming from thousands of IPs. They are using a tool called QHub.

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Thanks for wiby.me. I have seen QHub coming up in the scraping footprints, but my assumption has been that the footprint query is looking for Question and Answers sites powered by QHub containing their targeted terms, e.g. because there's a known vulnerability with QHub that their scripts can exploit to auto-post backlinks or whatever it is they do. There are lots of other hosting tools, other than QHub, that come up in the footprints as well. I found some lists of footprints by doing an internet search for one of them: "Designed by Mitre Design and SWOOP".

wibyweb2• 4 years ago

Interesting, thanks for that extra info.

phkahler• 4 years ago

> This time I’m really not sure what the solution is.

As with everything internet, the solution is to have solid, verifiable user identification. I realize the downside is that sites would love to have all your activity logged under a verifiable identity, so the other problem is we need to ban collection of such personal data.

hammock• 4 years ago

Makes me wonder whether Google tolerates bots on its search engine, to boost its ads revenue.

See also Twitter's extraordinary claim that 5% or less of its users are bots (or a claim from Twitter's detractors that up to 90% of its DAU are bots)

exyi• 4 years ago

I don't think it does, I get a ~~middle finger~~ recaptcha every time I try google something

mcovalt• 4 years ago

I noticed this on https://hndex.org. So many searches for hair loss products. Like thousands... daily.

closedloop1293• 4 years ago

I noted that there had been multiple weeks where not one single real person had visited a single blog entry for the whole week

The site is not on https://searchengine.party/ nor on seirdy.one's overview. Apart from the blog, how could users find that engine?

Is there some place where new search engines are announced and where new search engines band together to make themselves heard?

m-i-l9• 4 years ago

Actually seirdy.one added searchmysite.net to his excellent list[0] way back in March 2021[1].

[0] https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one/commit/ab92d8ded69fd869...

robmay• 4 years ago

While I'm generally a blockchain skeptic, this is actually a good use for a blockchain - to "register" bots so they have an id, and an owner, and you can measure their behavior. There are going to be more bots interacting with more sites, so, this could work.

arunsivadasan• 4 years ago

Thank you building something like this!

evanmoran• 4 years ago

Has anyone seen this bot growth with online newsletter signups? I’ve noticed a steady increase in signups but without any equivalent marking or product buzz that might account for it

melenaboija• 4 years ago

I am a total ignorant about search engines and I have a question after seeing all types of comments and projects popping up lately and criticizing Google results which is if it is realistic to think that something similar to Google could exist.

It seems to me that there are all sort of tools out there to do so such as all the public NLP implementations, vector search engines, ... and I wonder if it is that not everything that is needed is truly available, it is a matter of the needed resources to have something working or is just a matter of the products already existing and not getting traction (and I am not talking about the other big search engines).

arbuge• 4 years ago

It is my experience that SEO bots are increasingly ignoring robots.txt entries disallowing them from crawling our sites. Last week we noticed several doing this. I don't mind naming names - semrush, something called grapeshot crawler, something else called blex bot, and moz dotbot. Anyone else having the same experience?

AdamN• 4 years ago

IMHO what you should try is excluding all sites with excessive third-party cookies, sluggish performance, and too many ads. That will slice the index down by 80% probably but it would be a really nice thing to see. It might push out low quality SEO results for a couple of years.

guerrilla• 4 years ago

This is the solution. Google and DuckDuckGo should be doing this too (and make exceptions if they need to so that they don't collapse). We have to incentivize the good behavior and create an environment where people actually compete on the properties we want and not horseshit.

jrochkind1• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I understand the theory of what motivates the automated "powered by" searches; can anyone explain it (or an alternate theory) further?

hinkley• 4 years ago

I am slowly convincing my coworkers that deploying the exact same binary as two different 'services' is a significant tool to have in your toolbox. Some disaster recovery work we're doing is making it a much easier sell.

I'm really just combining two very old tricks here. Traffic shaping based on class of service for two different requests, and for two different classes of users.

Segregating bot traffic improves consumer experience. Segregating admin traffic from both allows you to set an upper and lower bound on availability.

MicahKV5• 4 years ago

So spammers have latched onto your search engine because they are getting useful results. They are able to systematically discover websites built on certain platforms that allow users to post content containing links, which they can target for link spam. It is very difficult to fight this on a technical level because there is an entire industry built around blackhat SEO, with all kinds of softwares and services dedicated to thwarting your defensive efforts. Even Google struggles to keep up with this.

However, they are also systematically feeding you their footprint lists. I imagine you could put together a footprint blacklist pretty quickly, and just stop returning results for any obvious spam queries like those containing "powered by wordpress".

It's not a very elegant solution I'll admit. It won't stop the bots from trying, and you may have to circle back periodically to add new footprints as they surface. But it's a potentially quick and easy way to stop rewarding their efforts, and the blackhat world is pretty used to burning out their resources so hopefully they will figure out it's a dead end and move on.

z3t42• 4 years ago

Or put those query results behind an anti-bot/"capcha" test.

MicahKV5• 4 years ago

That would probably help, but it's also a continuation of the cat and mouse game. There are plenty of captcha breaking services out there, it only cost about $1 to programmatically solve 1000 captchas.

Ikatza• 4 years ago

How about serving bots with one link per page, and taking a minute to serve each page? Would this impact their efficiency?

tofuahdude• 4 years ago

Captcha breaking is SO easy these days; even the modern captchas are easy to defeat.

pstuart• 4 years ago

If the confidence was high enough, perhaps return garbage data?

gopher_space• 4 years ago

It is very difficult to fight this on a technical level

It is when your base assumption is that you won't hire outside of engineering. There are more bored teenagers with phones than people creating quality content, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't just brute force checks against bad actors.

marginalia_nu15• 4 years ago

So spammers have latched onto your search engine because they are getting useful results.

I'm not sure about this. At least with my search engine, it doesn't really seem to matter what response they get, I don't even think they look at the responses. They keep hammering away with tens of thousands of queries per day with the requests even though they've seen nothing but HTTP Status 403 since last October or so.

My best guess is they're going after search engines in general in case they forward queries to google, in order to manipulate their typeahead suggestions.

MicahKV5• 4 years ago

Huh, well I guess there goes my theory about the incentive. What a bummer. I would have thought that at least with search engine scraping, they would stop expending the effort once the results dried up.

miohtama• 4 years ago

Put a CloudFlare web application firewall at the front of the site and then use its rate limited / CAPTCHA features to throttle traffic. It is the easiest way to get rid of parasitic scraping and API abuse. Cost is $0.

pascalxus• 4 years ago

just to throw out ideas: What if he decided to charge for each search?, say 1 cent or so. Users could purchase them in bulk, say 100 searches for a 1$.

The world is getting more and more desperate for a better search engine. the day may come, when people are willing to pay for better results.

wolpoli• 4 years ago

Considering that as of Mar 12, this search engine only has 1001 sites indexed, I am not sure how useful this site is for getting SEO backlinks. Speaking of which, are backlinks still a thing these days?

bladegash• 4 years ago

They are, but the useful ones are those coming from sites with higher domain authority rankings.

That’s why you'll see fluff pieces (aka, paid content) from online publications like Forbes for the better funded entities.

Another approach is the reach out to site operators with offers of writing content or asking them to link to your site’s content in their existing content.

It’s expensive and/or incredibly time consuming to get back links that matter.

miniwa• 4 years ago

what is the end goal here? i understand it's about making money somewhere down the road. but how?

john-radio• 4 years ago

Since everyone in this thread wants to jump down OP's throat about the quality of his web site, another interesting search engine is millionshort.com, which allows you to filter out the top N web sites from the results of your search. It's a great tool for looking past sites with good SEO; all you have to do is fiddle with the value of N.

For example, searching for "electronic music box" as /u/ajnin suggested, with the top 100K web sites removed from the results, filters out the following:

These 23 sites were removed from your results:
alibaba.com (1 result removed)
aliexpress.com (1 result removed)
allaboutcircuits.com (1 result removed)
amazon.com (2 result removed)
apple.com (1 result removed)
bestreviews.com (1 result removed)
ebay.com (1 result removed)
etsy.com (2 result removed)
facebook.com (1 result removed)
instructables.com (2 result removed)
lightinthebox.com (2 result removed)
lumberjocks.com (1 result removed)
mapquest.com (1 result removed)
reverb.com (1 result removed)
twitter.com (1 result removed)
wikipedia.org (1 result removed)
yelp.com (1 result removed)
youtube.com (2 result removed)

And the top result ends up being https://midiguy.com/.

blisterpeanuts• 4 years ago

That's an outstanding concept. One problem though: wouldn't it also filter out high quality curated results?

H8crilA• 4 years ago

Yes, such as Wikipedia, for example.

synicalx• 4 years ago

I assume the idea is this is a secondary search, after Google has failed once again to return anything other than Etsy and Pinterest results.

It also seems fairly customisable, like I can search and include all results but choose to remove ecommerce, or sites with live chat (weird filter, but I like it).

mdoms• 4 years ago

Million Short also has an option to remove only e-commerce results which is invaluable if you still want results from sites like Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube but don't want online shopping spam.

consp• 4 years ago

Would this also work for the fake-sites-stealing-text-to-look-legit sites since they quickly end up in the top results?

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

People will only use your product if they know about it and perceive value in it. How do people know about it, and why would they want to use it?

On "Most of the tiny number of real users have come from links posted to places like Hacker News, and there is almost no organic traffic from other search engines" - Organic traffic comes from word of mouth. Are people talking about your site? If they're not, you're not gonna see organic traffic. You could do what others do and pay some influencers to advertise your site, but that's expensive and not as scalable as "real" buzz. Is your product exciting or controversial? If not, why would people talk about it?

Your homepage's tag line is "Open source search engine and search as a service for personal and independent websites." A regular person's eyes would glaze as they try to figure out what this means. Given some time they might put together the words "search engine" and "personal" and "websites" and figure this is a blog search engine. So just say that.

The "Newest Pages" section is a fun novelty, but after a few minutes the novelty wears off.

The "Browse Sites" section is almost useful. Next to the list of sites I see some tags. Why isn't a heatmap of the tags the first thing I see? That would be way more useful than a paginated list of random sites.

Your "About" page lists "community-based approach to content curation". This is the most exciting aspect of the whole endeavor, so add that to your front page blurb ("Community search engine"). You would probably do well to build a real community around it, for example with a forum or chat system (GitHub Discussions does not count). A SubReddit would be an easy way to bootstrap this and later move it to your own hosted forum.

You'll probably need a very complicated moderation system if this thing takes off.

egberts1• 4 years ago

Error codes. Open source that reports in mysterious error codes.

Used to be able to Google for those; now, not so much.

not2b• 4 years ago

The conclusion isn't that there's nobody out there, but that the billion-odd people who use search engines every day have no idea what searchmysite.net is. They use Google, often without even knowing it because they just type some words into their browser and take what they get.

_tom_3• 4 years ago

I think many people in the comments here, and most users, are missing that you index a SMALL subset of the web. This leads to people running a default test search, finding no results, and concluding your search engine is bad, and leaving.

While you imply that in the search page, obviously it's not clear enough.

Maybe add "this search engine only searches a small set of user submitted sites. Click <here> for the list. Or <here> to add your site."

iamwil• 4 years ago

To the OP of the article, this is great. I had just never known about it, to use it for searching.

Usually quality blog posts on specific technical topics are just things I run across through HN, lobsters, or twitter. Now it's one more channel to look for things that I'm specifically researching, like CRDTs. Kudos!

randomstring2• 4 years ago

Search traffic has always been mostly automated spam bots.

Even back in the Open Directory Days when we powered part of search.netscape.com I estimated 80+% of all search traffic was automated. At least most of it self-identified with the same Java useragent.

Later when working Topix, despite being a news search engine, most traffic was bot traffic. Most included the word “mortgage” in the query. Topix specialized in localized content, and that was very popular for SEO scrapers.

Lastly at Blekko, I estimate 90+% of traffic was automated. By then maybe half or more learned to change the user agent. Most used HTTP/1.0, a dead giveaway as no browser still uses 1.0. This was a major aspect in Blekko's load shedding strategy. If the servers started to get overloaded, we'd start bouncing suspected bot traffic to a redirect that would show in the logs. If there was a human with a modern browser running javascript on the other end, would get redirect to a link that wouldn't get bounced. I would check the logs weekly to see if any humans got caught. None ever did. This was a huge monetary savings, you only need 1/10th the servers if you can safely ignore the bots.

Often it's endless repetition of the same keywords in a random order with a place name appended, or prepended, or inserted. over and over. Often variations on known monetizatable SEO keywords. However, much of it doesn't make any sense.

I don't have any insight into Google's numbers but I would conservatively estimate 95% or more of all their queries are automated bots and not humans. And the level of spy-vs-spy going on for Google CPU resources vs SEO bots is probably pretty evolved by now. I stopped tracking many years ago when Google switched to densely packed obfuscated javascript for page renders. Maybe this is part of why automated queries are so high across the web, maybe google is too hard to crack for most.

superjan• 4 years ago

Almost sounds like it is justified to add a javascript crypto miner to your pages to make the bots pay for the use of your service.

randomstring2• 4 years ago

The point is that the vast majority of scrapers do not bother to run javascript.

stevenicr2• 4 years ago

appreciate the sharing of info here.

I have recently been discovering and combating some similar, albeit much smaller issues.

I've been finding that a bunch of my recent 'resource sucks' have been constant spidering from petal-bot, semrush bot, alibiba-bot and a few others.

Using the wordpress plugin stop-bad-bots and it's logs has been eye-opening for me recently.

I understand many of these are not directly dark-seo related, but their aggressive nature is hurting the cpu and memory limits of some of my servers and sites so it's a big issue regardless of the intents behind them.

(kind of) glad someone else has dealt with these issues, and glad to see some of the 'how' for handling, identifying, and some actual real numbers for the impacts, as I've been guessing some of these things in my small projects, indeed it's a real thing. As well as a practical issue to pay attention to and work on.

munk-a• 4 years ago

Could you possibly use your robots.txt to redirect them all to ad-laiden pages to try and subsidize your legitimate users?

westcort• 4 years ago

My key takeaways:

1. Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

2. In summary, if they break through the current reverse proxy level protection, options include an invisible ReCAPTCHA (but given I’ve sometimes 160,000 requests a day I’d be well over the 1,000,000 a month free tier limit), requiring JavaScript as per the web analytics or some Cross Site Request Forgery style protection (but those would place much more load on the servers), or CloudFlare (but the searchmysite.net spider is still currently blocked by CloudFlare as per Some of the challenges of building an internet search)

3. If you were into conspiracy theories you could claim that the major search engines were trying to stifle the competition, but a more realistic explanation is simply that searchmysite.net is being drowned out by SEO spam

4. If I’d had a decent amount of real users visiting and never returning I could reasonably conclude that updating the blog wasn’t the most productive use of my time and effort, but without any real users in the first place it is hard to gauge whether people like it or not

My own independent search engine, https://www.locserendipity.com, is seeing similar trends.

alphabet9000• 4 years ago

i recently built a habitat for spam bots, they eventually found it and now post peacefully

https://upstairs.treehouse.telnet.asia/pharm/cylohexapine

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

It's beautiful to see nature healing

tbm57• 4 years ago

Maybe someone should start an internet rewilding project

getcrunk• 4 years ago

this is the best thing I have ever seen. Its art, engineering, biology and sociology. Do you write blog posts about it?

edenfed• 4 years ago

I’m currently building a search engine made specifically for developers. We are searching directly in GitHub/StackOverfow/Reddit so SEO is not a problem. You are welcome to try it at https://keyval.dev

mfrye0• 4 years ago

I run a data aggregation company that has a fairly advanced scraping infrastructure for collecting data across the web. Having built the scraping side, I'm pretty familiar with most of the strategies for avoiding bot detection.

Coming from that perspective, detecting and stopping at least the majority of bots out there is fairly doable, and I put together a rudimentary thing for a side project.

The core of it uses an IP API for looking up the requesting IP to identify the country and if it's coming from a data center, VPN, Tor, etc. If it passes that, I trigger Google Captcha to show up. Lastly, I track IPs that make it through and have some basic rules in place to try to detect patterns and block offenders that way.

There's a bunch more stuff you can check for, but the core of it is basically filtering out data center traffic to minimize the requests going to Google Captcha.

unnouinceput• 4 years ago

Plot twist: His website/search engine/blog is written by a bot and not a real person behind.

justjonathan• 4 years ago

I just learned of your site through this post, it looks useful (and not just for SEO spam), thank you.

Some feedback: some initial searches did not find blogs that were of interest. When browsing I noticed the tags. I wish there was a page of tags that I could browse. If there is, I could not find it.

Also many of the site titles do not provide useful information on their topics and are untagged. If you could auto generate some tags, perhaps based on word frequency in post titles (with some stopwords no doubt), that would improve the browsing experience, at least for me.

ge96• 4 years ago

Random tangent related to SEO I am so annoyed with random overseas companies faking local businesses by SEO

They will get your call and you can tell where you're talking to immediately. Then they get a quote that's increased to get their cut... That's then carried out by an actual local company. It's annoying because the websites at the top of the search appear local.

A specific example is when you're looking for a towing company.

Type in your state/city towing company, more than likely the top results/websites pinned to GMaps are not local-based.

bill_mcgonigle• 4 years ago

Check out your DNS stats too. Mine are up 500% YoY for no human reason.

xandor• 4 years ago

I've found an effective way to filter bots is to check their headers. The order and capitalization of the headers. Browsers will always send headers over with the same capitalization and order (unless some plugin interfering is installed). Check your bot traffic and see what browser it's masquerading as, then compare some headers that are sent over by that browser and version. For example 'Content-type' is coming over as 'content-type' or 'Content-Type'. Or the bot is not sending the Accepts header whereas Chrome always sends it. A few small checks on the headers can help easily identify a lot of the bots.

Chances are they're not going to take the time to figure out your specific site's mitigation measures and just let the bot fail crawling or move on.

Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

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