Neocities Is Blocked by Bing
Seeing as a lot of the “We’re Not Google” search engines I’d been using (ie: DuckDuckGo) were just Bing skins, I find myself like “now what?”.
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Stay classy, Microsoft.
It just figures that they’d do this, but I don’t get why. It’s not like Neocities competes with LinkedIn to be the Ashley Madison of job hunting.
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Oh what the hell. That’s so PETTY.
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Confusing and disappointing.
Note I’m under no illusions about this fixing the problem as a whole, but for anyone unfamiliar I’d suggest Marginalia as a search engine for smaller non-commercial sites.
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Anyone surprised by this hasn’t seen the stuff that slips through the “active and sophisticated moderation process”.
It doesn’t take much for a domain to get flagged. I’ve seen everything from clear phishing sites to much much worse.
Looks like a deliberate attack on the small web if you ask me. Its existence endangers the likes of MS after all, by showing that alternatives can and do exist.
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Let’s not be hyperbolic. Smells of “I hate you” / “I don’t think about you at all”
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I wonder how many people come across neocities sites by using search engines? For me, since I use it, I find stuff through the feed there or just clicking on people’s links.
I guess that doesn’t work for a person who hasn’t come across neocities yet, but it feels like if you’re someone who is already interested in the small web, you’re bound to hear about it in a blog post or a forum?
Sometimes, (granted, only sometimes) I’ve searched the name of an netizen with a Social Media presence to find they have a NeoCities (or otherwise small-web) site. Those cases have been a pleasant surprise.
I’ve also found some webrings that way.
I feel like I could (and should) do more Link-Page-to-Link-Page browsing instead of my usual “Oh Joy! This person has a personal website too!”-type discovery. 
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Don’t get too hung up on ‘could’ or ‘should’. If you developed certain browsing/discovery habits, it’s because at one point they served you. If they no longer serve, by all means develop new ones. But don’t be too hard on your past self. They had their reasons and were doing the best they could.
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I hear you, and like @starbreaker, no shame in using a search engine for…searching…hahaha, that’s what they’re supposed to be there for!
But yeah, I feel so much frustration with search engines lately and this is like another thing that gives me pause. Cause…why??? And then it’s like, there’s alternatives but they’re still Bing or Google underneath? I’m not the most knowledgeable about all that, but I did switch to DuckDuckGo a while ago because I wanted to get away from Google and then it’s like, Microsoft anyway?
Kinda feels like being a little bug scurrying from rock to rock that keeps getting turned over by a nosy kid. 
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I’m confused where this sentiment is coming from. I’m very active on Neocities including checking th global feed frequently, what exactly is everyone else doing where they see all these phishing sites and AI slop machines, and “much much worse“ (illegal???)
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We just deployed an update for this issue. Neocities results should now be appearing again when searching for “neocities” or for sites with neocities.org in the URL. (Let us know if you see otherwise) Sites hosted on Neocities that don’t include neocities.org in the URL shouldn’t have been affected.
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YAY thank goodness for this at least. still so strange. i doubt we’ll ever know for sure what caused this (automod/malicious intent/spam filter/whatever tf) but at least its being worked on in some capacity by common search engines like ddg:)
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So only if one actively searches for NeoCities, but no serendipitously stumbling upon a NeoCities site that may happen to be relevant…
A Bittersweet Bummer.
Ostensibly. I’m not sure I know of a good example to test it with, since my own site isn’t necessarily well indexed. I tried running a search for @Solaria‘s Webspace by name though, and the search results included the Neocities browse page…? But not Solaria’s site directly. For whatever that’s worth.
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I was wondering why I was mentioned in this thread despite not yet commenting haha
But that’s interesting, I tried the same thing and got similar results. The neocities browse page, two sites mentioning mine, and some junk. However I did try “solaria’s webspace neocities” and got good results:
Now that I’m here in the thread though I’ll share my two cents about the general topic. I don’t necessarily think bing is intentionally trying to hide small personal sites like ours, more just that they came up with a lazy solution to the phishing problem, and don’t care that their “solution” backfired against honest real people. Still bad but I don’t think big companies see us as a real threat.
However it is nice to see that it seems like duckduckgo cares! Even if it’s not perfectly restored atm
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This is so sad to see. I’m struggling to understand the motivation behind blocking it. Even if it were for content reasons (and I know there’s plenty of objectionable content hidden away on there), banning an entire content source which still has active moderation is such a sledgehammer move and I really doubt the worst neocities sites warranted this move.
No bother though. We’ll have to encourage anyone using neocities to grab a free subdomain from somewhere to use instead of the bare neocities link, that should help them get around this issue.
I wonder what the “objectionable content” might be. Quite honestly, there’s certain things that would cause me to never use neocities if they allow it on their platform.
Anyway, big platforms have been notorious for their content moderation issues, to the point where they’ve allowed content that is illegal in many/most jurisdictions and which is, at the very least, generally frowned upon. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, X, etc. have all had issues with content like child and animal abuse, violent threats, harassment, the works. That big search engines don’t censor them for this is unsurprising but it goes to show just how much they’re framed as too big to stop.
I’m not sure I believe Microsoft’s doing this to target the indie web or to be spiteful to Neocities. The more likely scenario is that they didn’t really care.
Whatever they want, such as queer stuff or sex education. That’s the point of vagueness… and the danger.
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