Blog for searchmysite.net on

After all the time and effort spent in the battle against the bots and large volumes of automated submissions of AI slop, I thought I should do something which actually benefits legitimate users for a change, especially after the good feedback for the sea…

For the past few years I’ve just been posting annual summaries on this blog1, but I’m going to make an exception today to announce an important change.

searchmysite.net is 6 years old today!

Today marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of searchmysite.net, and it is also a year since the last blog entry (which was the Four year retrospective), so now seems a good time to summarise progress.

Today is the 4 year anniversary of searchmysite.net (the open source search engine for the indieweb / small web / digital gardens, which heavily downranks pages with adverts, and aims to pay running costs via a listing fee and search-as-a-service), so that

Milestones 17 Jul 2020 - the first site submitted by a real user and indexed. 12 Mar 2022 - the 1000th site, around 20 months later. 15 Dec 2023 - the 2000th site, roughly 21 months after the 1000th.

Some exciting news, first hinted at in the Three year retrospective: the searchmysite.net redesign has been launched, thanks to its first major open source contributor Lucas Gramajo.

Today is the 3 year anniversary1 of searchmysite.net (the open source search engine for the indieweb / small web / digital gardens, which heavily downranks pages with adverts, and aims to pay running costs via a listing fee and search-as-a-service), so th…

Running costs This is a short post comparing previous running costs on AWS and current running costs on Hetzner.

A quick summary of the new web feed for all search results All search results pages (including Newest Pages and Browse Sites) now have a web feed icon in the top middle next to the results count (in between the Filters and Sort by).

This is a quick post summarising the simplified site listing workflow and search as a service improvements.

This post is to provide an update on the automated SEO searches issue described in my last post Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots.

Introduction searchmysite.net was launched nearly 2 years ago to help people discover all the great original content on personal and independent websites which is so hard to find now that the major search engines have become swamped by SEO spam.

The 1,000th site indexed by searchmysite.net is… weeklymusings.net run by scottnesbitt.online: It was submitted and indexed on Monday 7 March 2022.

Priorities for 2022 As detailed in the searchmysite.net retrospective and future plans, one of the priorities for 2022 was moving to a cheaper hosting provider (another was to spend less time writing blog entries, hence this being a brief post).

Introduction It has been around 1.5 years since I launched searchmysite.net as a side-project to try and address the problems with the current commercial internet search offerings, and I reckon I’ve now spent around 650 hours working on it1.

So I’ve finally managed to index Wikipedia, or at least the 6,392,807 English language pages.

One of the objectives of searchmysite.net - indexing just good quality content It is a truth universally acknowledged that most of the modern internet is rubbish.

Introduction This is just a quick update on progress.

Introduction searchmysite.net is an open source search engine and search as a service for personal and independent websites.

searchmysite.net is an open source search engine and search as a service for personal and independent websites, which has a unique approach to advertising to try to tackle spam.

Introduction I used the quote “talk is cheap, show me the code” in the introduction to my first post on searchmysite.net.

Introduction to relevancy tuning for searchmysite.net This post contains details of the most recent round of relevancy tuning for searchmysite.net.

Introduction Keen-eyed observers may have noticed that the Analytics section on the Privacy Policy has recently been updated.

Introduction In my last major post, searchmysite.net update: Seeding and scaling from 25 Sept 2020, I concluded “I’ll ease off on enhancements, and try to focus on adoption for a while”.

Welcome Welcome to the first post on searchmysite.net’s new blog.

Introduction This post shows how I added a simple search page to my personal website with searchmysite.net.

Introduction It has been just over 2 months since I launched https://searchmysite.net.

Introduction I’ve written previously about what went wrong with the internet and how to fix it, and one of the ideas I mentioned was a new model for search.