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.First major open source contributor Just to clarify, there have been other open source contributors to searchmysite.net before. The first was Binyamin, who contributed the favicon on 23 Oct 2020. And after searchmysite.net was fully open sourced in Dec 2020, there have been other contributions in the form of bug reports, discussion etc. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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). Clicking this takes you to an OpenSearch Atom format web feed1 for that query.This allows you to, for example: Subscribe to new posts about your favourite topics. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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. It references the discussion on Hacker News (HN) from Mon 16 May.Traffic and system performance and stability In terms of traffic, there were 18,034 visitors to blog.searchmysite.net on Mon 16 May and 2,699 visitors to searchmysite.net, pretty much all of which came as a result of the HN post: Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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. (The 1,001st site indexed was uh.edu/engines.)It was part of a flurry of new submissions, thanks largely to the mention at hubme.it/search-my-site.Note that it is the 1,000th site indexed rather than submitted. Many more sites have been submitted than are currently indexed, because some (currently 357) have been submitted but not approved for indexing, and some (currently 43, i. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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. The 2021 year end seems a good opportunity for a retrospective of what has gone well, what has gone neither well nor not so well, and what has not gone so well. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

So I’ve finally managed to index Wikipedia, or at least the 6,392,807 English language pages.Some of the benefits this brings to searchmysite.net: It turns it into a much more useful search engine for day-to-day usage. Many of my internet searches in the past have simply ended with clicks to Wikipedia, so now when I’m performing that sort of search I can use searchmysite.net to get the Wikipedia link and see if there are any other personal or independent sites which have anything interesting to say on the topic. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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. Even Google appears to index trillions of pages1 but only saves around “hundreds of billions”2 in their search index, suggesting even they chuck most of it out.The approach searchmysite.net takes is to try to index just “the good stuff”, rather than to try to index the whole internet with all of its garbage, and better quality content in the index should be a factor which helps improve results quality. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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. I mentioned this approach to advertising in my last post. While this attracted a lot of positivity, it also unfortunately got some negativity1, so I thought I’d write a quick post to clarify my position on advertising and search engines, hopefully in positive terms. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

Introduction I used the quote “talk is cheap, show me the code” in the introduction to my first post on searchmysite.net. Well, here it is: https://github.com/searchmysite/searchmysite.net/.Why aren’t other search engines open source? Pretty much every other search engine treats their inner workings as a closely guarded secret. This is to stop the spammers figuring out how to game the system and increase the ranking of their results to earn a greater share of the advertising revenue. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

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”. So how has that gone? Well, I had a nice burst of activity between 16 and 19 Oct, with 215 sites submitted in 4 days, which was great and led to some really useful feedback, including the first site to use the searchmysite. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

Welcome Welcome to the first post on searchmysite.net’s new blog. Well the first one first posted on this blog - there are actually some earlier posts which I’ve copied over from my personal site where they were first published: searchmysite.net: Building a simple search for non-commercial websites (18 Jul 2020) searchmysite.net update: Seeding and scaling (25 Sep 2020) Adding a simple search page to my personal website with searchmysite.net (9 Oct 2020) I decided to split the blogs out because there’s quite a bit I want to write on both, and searchmysite. Continue reading at the publisher's website.

Introduction This post shows how I added a simple search page to my personal website with searchmysite.net. You can click on it and try it out via the Search link at the top of any page on my site. Note that it is very simple.I know I don’t really need search functionality given that my personal website only currently has a few posts, but I wanted to test the process out and demonstrate it. Continue reading at the publisher's website.