271–280 of 391 posts
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 dedic…
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https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics You surf with JS off because of sites abusing their users' data. This is not it.
> You surf with JS off because of sites abusing their users' data. This is not it. Wrong. I surf with JS off because of sites that use JS to collect information about me. If it's available on the server, then sure that might be considered fair game. But using javascript (or any other client-side tool) to do what you should instead do server-side is abusing users (or their data). Putting analytics inline so it's "not…
Plausible doesn't collect information about you, but the site's usage. Do you also object to physical stores putting up cameras?
Here's their own instance, open to public.
https://plausible.io/plausible.io
> If it's available on the server, then sure that might be considered fair game. But using javascript (or any other client-side tool) to do what you should instead do server-side is abusing users (or their data).
That's quite the affirmation. Is this fact or opinion?
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…
Just host a 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.
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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. relatin…
How exactly is a "general purpose search engine" different than a "search engine to try and find some of the fun and interesting content"?
Try looking up a phone number (by number) in google for a great example of nothing but spam results.
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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…
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 ther…
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 dedic…
Or put those query results behind an anti-bot/"capcha" test.
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 te…
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.
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".
Used to be able to Google for those; now, not so much.
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Or put those query results behind an anti-bot/"capcha" test.
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.
Newest captcha services are a prediction score, not even a verification screen, and you can feed polluting data to bots you are certain to exist.