Neocities is currently blocked by Bing (and by extension DuckDuckGo)

Read here.

Over the past few months, the Bing search engine has completely blocked the domain neocities.org, including the front site and all user subdomains (example.neocities.org), from its search index.

This is not a partial demotion, a ranking issue, or a temporary crawl problem. The entire domain is completely excluded.

In addition to excluding neocities.org from search results, when we discovered the block, Bing was also placing what appeared to be a phishing attack against Neocities on the first page of search results. This is not only bad for search results, it’s very possible that it is actively dangerous. After complaints (it required several) they deranked the suspected phishing site, but neocities.org results remain blocked, and it is possibly only a matter of time before another concerning site appears on Bing searches for Neocities (it’s easy to get higher pagerank than a blocked site).

In addition to the safety concerns, this also unfairly affects over 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities, the vast majority of which are personal, artistic, educational, or experimental projects with no commercial or malicious intent. These are brilliant and wonderful sites with billions of human visitors per month and they don’t deserve to be blocked from an entire search engine for no reason.

We have repeatedly attempted to resolve this through Bing’s official webmaster and support channels, and a few internal channels. Despite these efforts, Bing has declined to reverse the block or provide a clear, actionable explanation for it. At this point, we have exhausted all reasonable avenues for remediation except public disclosure.

Because of this, we are recommending that Neocities users, and the broader internet in general, not use Bing or search engines that source their results from Bing until this issue is resolved.

In addition to Bing, there are other search engines that currently rely on Bing’s search results, including but not limited to DuckDuckGo.

If you use Bing or Bing-powered search engines, Neocities sites will not appear in your search results, regardless of content quality, originality, or compliance with webmaster guidelines. If any Neocities-like sites appear on these results, they may be active phishing attacks against Neocities and should be treated with caution.

Neocities Cyberpet Shrines

As Neocities is still blocked by Bing (and search engines that use Bing's indexing, like DDG), I used Google to find these sites.

The Meerkat's Burrow

Dee Dreslooh's dragons used to be all over the web. Good to be able to place a name on her. You'll also notice elsewhere on the page that (pre-brony) MLP sensibilities were part of the cyberpet scene, alongside the influences from Japanese media, and of course the giant influence of Anne Mcaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern - the novels about psychic, alien, color-coded dragons that wholesale invented the trope of the dragon-rider.

Shywell

"Jona's Weyr" has haunted me for decades - I had remembered the art close to crystal-clear (unusual for me, on account of my awful memory issues) in my mind, yet the name of the website and artist eluded me the entire time; only now, finally, can I reach catharsis, thanks to Shywell's own memory and records. While there don't seem to be any real direct records of Jona's wyverns left online, as the site had already shrunk into a shadow of its former self by the time Wayback first captured it... I remember those wyverns clearer than most things in my life: wings half-folded in front of then in midair, serpentine, small and legless. (This was before Dragonology, published in 2003, popularized amphiptere for winged, legless dragons.) The background image of the waybacked 2002 version of the page is evidence my memory failed me less than usual. The only thing I misremembered, it seems, was the heads being snakelike, instead of fully draconic.

Her "crystal wyverns" my first exposure to the concept of wyverns, and I've longed for those serpents ever since. I have no idea how old I was when I first found the site. Considering when I was born... I was probably very young. Her website, according to one of her affiliate sites, went down in 2005.

Arborwin

Don't remember these pets as much, but evidence that traditional art cyberpet agencies existed. For a scene I largely associate with the dragon/cat/wolf cluster of creature enthusiast, I forget that a lot of horse enjoyers were making pets too: pegasi and unicorns ranging from MLP-like to shockingly realistic. Naturalistic coats that display a love for the colors and patterns of the equine race, in addition to rainbow and pastel.

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Unrelated to cyberpets, but related to the overarching Y2K era fascination with "virtual pets," "artificial life," and technology-based animals in general, I also found a fansite dedicated to a specific operating system of pseudo-Tamagotchi, known unofficially as the "bunnyrom" or officially as Jia Yuan.