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

[malymin]

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.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Well, this explains why I saw neocities in Google results last night but not DDG. How annoying.

[malymin]

Isn't it? A lot of good sites are on Neocities, so this is frankly a massive issue.

Honestly, though, why are so many search engines apparently dependant on Bing in the first place???

Someone from the Petz Discord made this comment:

A short list of search engines that use Bing as their index source:

KarmaSearch, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, AOL Search, Swisscows, Lycos, Oscobo, Ekoru, and probably some more I am not aware of.
StartPage does not use Bing so when you search for say, 'Phantasmagoria petz' you'll get Queenies site right at the top of the results as you should.

And then later added:

They use that as an index, yes.

Very few search engines now use their own crawlers/indexes because that is expensive to run. So they hook into the major ones and use their indexes.

The old web search engines were way better because they did use their own stuff. So you could search on one, and then do the same search on a different one and get different results.

And I just... I understand the cost analysis at play, but what's even the point of all these alternate search engines, if they all depend on the exact same big-corporation search engine??? (Also good god, Yahoo is dependant on Bing? How the once-mighty have fallen! I remember when Yahoo was considered a respectable search engine, as good as Google if not better...)