Bing/DDG has also blocked the emulation wiki (https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/) for some reason. I noticed when I forgot the domain and tried looking for the site.
For the record, Google returns it as the top result.
Before you say haha no one is using bing… Your beloved DuckDuckGo uses bing results and this means it’s censored there too. And it’s not only about the start page https://neocities.org/ (which can be found with DuckDuckGo via Wikipedia Snippet). None of the hosted sites are in the index.
Well is that true? I searched duckduckgo and kagi something and neocities and both gave results. Bing did not.
Edit: Seems like I got lucky with search terms. Often it returns nothing the more terms I try. The AI tool in ddg always returns sites so thats weird.
Well whateever, I switched to Kagi anyways.
I chose a random neocities website and searched with both DDG and Google. The search was “irony machine neocities” without quotes. Google yielded a result which pointed to the correct URL https://irony-machine.neocities.org/ while DDG did not.
irony machine neocities
My first duckduckgo result was a scam result site for that domain to check if it was safe, lol.
Second result was the creators website page that linked back to neocities.
The duckduck AI result at the top however was a direct link to the neocities page. Interesting.
Kagi’s results were first result was the link.
I concede though, it is hit and miss with Duckduckgo, even doing site:neocities.org
Interesting, if i do site:neocities.org with a random search term e.g.
site:neocities.org animein DDG I get zero results. In google, this yields thousands of neocities subdomains. Do you get any relevant results in DDG this way?Yeah, I see that. I must have just been lucky with my choice of search terms. I concede, its worse. The AI function shows them though, which is due to it crawling the tags? I don’t know.
I havent used google in a long time, I switched to Kagi and it works.
Probably depends on what AI DDG is using… I switched DDG to noai so I don’t see any generated results
Man, who could hate Neocities? There’s so many gorgeous “retro” websites on there. Brings me back to my childhood.
Why?
While I think it’s shitty that they did this, part of me also kind of likes it. The most resilient form of web behavior includes bookmarking sites and discovering new sites by them linking to each other, and also via conversation with others online, rather than getting all your sites from a search engine. I get that search engines are useful for lots of things. But maybe this will help kick people’s search engine addiction if they realize there’s lots of good stuff out there that you can’t trust a search engine to surface.
We need a “Fedi-Search engine”
Yes I do think something like this would be nice. We don’t need one giga search engine with a huge index of everything. Specialized search engines with genre specific indices would be more individually maintainable, and diverse
Wouldn’t want unmoderated* information and opinions appearing in Microslop search results now would you?
*unmoderated by Big Tech Fascist AI Filters
laughs in Kagi
Money bags over here is laughing at us
The price of one coffee a month. Bling bling, mothafuckas!
Kagi is $10 a month for the decent (not weirdly limited) plan. That’s a hell of an expensive coffee.
Ok, two coffees.
Just giving you shit, though I have always hated the “cup of coffee” comparison as I think people buying those expensive coffees out all the time are being foolish. Coffee at home is much better and much cheaper IMO.
I’m with you, I make it at home and it’s much better and I don’t waste hundreds of dollars a month on it like a lot of people do. What’s a better $5 comparison, a smoothie? Nah, that’s also better at home. How about a scoop of ice cream.
I honestly don’t know! With the rapid inflation and price gouging, I feel like I’m a character on Arrested Development trying to guess prices of common items.
Put it this way: saving money by drinking coffee at home is what funds your Kagi subscription. That’s 2 coffees a month and you still have 28 left to allocate, or just save.
5 dollars buys me a week of coffee.
Mr has coffee once a month over here 😂
laughs I at least my search results aren’t tied to a credit card holder which identifies me
Does kagi do its own indexing?
Some, especially for “small web” sites.
…people use Bing?
*checks browser marketshare…
Ha, Bing doesn’t even have 5% marketshare.
Oh no, Firefox has less than half of Bing’s marketshare. Fuck me, what’s wrong with internet users. I know Firefox isn’t perfect, but there’s other forks of it for various use-cases.
Dick Duck Go gets its search results from Bing.
IIRC that’s just one of the backends they use for their results
I just opened neocities.org with it, but nothing specific.
I can’t even convince my spouse to switch to firefox to get adblocking back. Browsers are entirely transparent to most users :\
If you’re savvy, look at blocking them at the dns level with software like pihole or blocky.
Just install it and change the icon.
Wait, what browser are they using that doesn’t support plugins? IE11?
It’s not about no plugin support… It’s about Chroma and Manifest V3 crippling adblocking plugin capabilities.
Yeah, if you really wanted to use chrome, you’d have to use something like Brave where they forked and did not move over to Manifest V3.
Wouldn’t want my spouse to fuck with my computer.
…people use Geocities?
Over 1.5 million Neocities websites; Geocities, however, is dead.
Ok, same question. People use neocities?
1.5 million websites that, whether obscure or not, deserve to be indexed no less than the many obscure GitHub pages that Microsoft is sure to index.
More than I would have thought, but, 1.5 million html documents on a single site - does anyone go there looking for anything?
I always just made my own sites, or hosted my own, a static site is easy enough. I wouldn’t want to be lumped in with a free site. Warned a lot of people that putting your stuff on geocities was going to be a bad idea, and they almost disappeared altogether.
But you mentioning Github really is enlightening, because that is the other super easy way to make free sites as long as you have the domain name. So if you had a free geocities site, but owned a domain the redirected to your specific page would it crawl it?
In any case a search engine IS USELESS if they arbitrarily cut out any domain. No matter what they host.
Oh. Whups.
For normies Chrome IS the internet.
You’re probably too young to remember that in an old version of windows, Internet Explorer’s desktop icon was labeled “The Internet”. Nowadays, people think Google is “the internet”. My boomer dad says he “has Gemini”… bruh, you’re just searching shit on Google.
Well, I’m 44 so I do remember those days, but I used to be a Netscape user, so there’s that.
“Normies” don’t use PCs anymore. Whatever apps the phone vendor preinstalled, Web or other, is the internet.
This also applies to the results on Duckduckgo so I assume this affects a lot of people here.
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I was hoping qwant, with its own (partial) search index, would be immune to it, but searching for neocities also doesn’t show any results for neocities.org there unfortunately, or at least it did not for me.
will ig am switching off DDG
Startpage seems nice. Uses sanitized results from Google and while it does have an AI feature, it’s opt-in (not out) and looks to also be sanitized.
It has sponsored results though.
I wanted to use start page but this site and others don’t have a forum search.
I want to (try) relying less on Google And Microsoft so I decided to try mojeek.
Mojeek was a huge miss for me. Search results were mostly irrelevant to my search queries. I’ve yet to find any search engine that isn’t trash, though.
For me its decent but I don’t like how it doesn’t have a spell check.
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Oh no! Bing got to this guy too!











