Blog for searchmysite.net

Four year retrospective

A summary of the status of searchmysite.net on its 4 year anniversary. more...

Milestone: 2,000th site indexed

The 2,000th site has been indexed by searchmysite.net. more...

Introducing the redesign and first major open source contributor

The searchmysite.net redesign has been launched, thanks to its first major open source contributor Lucas Gramajo. more...

Three year retrospective

A summary of progress and future plans, on the 3 year anniversary of searchmysite.net. more...

Migrating off AWS has reduced running costs by 80%

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

Lots of new web feed (RSS and Atom) related functionality

Including a web feed for all search results pages, allowing you to e.g. subscribe to new posts about your favourite topics, or create feeds for sites which don't already have them. more...

New site listing workflow and search as a service improvements

The simplified site listing workflow aims to be more robust and clearer for users, and the search as a service improvements include the ability to resubscribe and a Free Trial listing. more...

An update on the automated SEO searches issue

This post is to provide an update on the automated SEO searches issue described in my last post. more...

Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

searchmysite.net was designed to be a search engine free from SEO spam, but now almost all traffic comes from SEO spammers. more...

Milestone: 1,000th site indexed

The 1,000th site indexed by searchmysite.net is weeklymusings.net. more...

Switching to cheaper hosting and stopping indexing wikipedia to cut costs

A short post on the new hosting provider and cost savings. more...

searchmysite.net retrospective and future plans

A retrospective of how things have gone until year end 2021, and based on that some thoughts on where it should go in 2022. more...

searchmysite.net now with added Wikipedia goodness

This post has some more technical information on the indexing of Wikipedia for searchmysite.net. more...

Some of the challenges of building an internet search

Of recent indexing failures, 62% are sites going offline, 19% are sites where robots.txt blocks indexing, and 5.5% are where Cloudflare blocks indexing. more...

Progress update Q1 & Q2 2021

This is just a quick update on progress since the last post on 30 Jan 2021. more...

searchmysite.net: The delicate matter of the bill

searchmysite.net is bootstrapped with no external funding. This post contains a review of current and expected running costs, and a summary of the plan to pay these. more...

Advertising and search engines: When it is okay to mix and when it is not

searchmysite's approach to advertising has attracted a lot of positivity, but some negativity, so this post is to clarify the position on advertising and search engines. more...

searchmysite.net is now open source

Topics in this post include: Why aren't other search engines open source? What open source licence is it? What are the future plans? and How can I contribute? more...

Relevancy tuning for searchmysite.net

This post summarises the relevancy tuning following user feedback and growth. Ranking can be openly discussed because of the unique model designed to disincentivise spam. more...

Web analytics on searchmysite.net

Keen-eyed observers may have noticed that the Analytics section on the Privacy Policy has recently been updated. This is a short post with further information. more...

Improving stability and fixing issues on searchmysite.net

In the 4 days from 16 to 19 Oct, 215 sites were submitted. While this was great and led to some really useful feedback, it did expose some issues summarised here. more...

searchmysite.net now has its own blog

Welcome to blog.searchmysite.net. I've split it from my personal website because searchmysite.net does seem to be starting to get a life of its own now. more...

Adding a simple search page to my personal website with searchmysite.net

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

searchmysite.net update: Seeding and scaling

It has been over 2 months since https://searchmysite.net was launched, and I've had some good feedback. This post summarises the main changes - seeding and scaling. more...

searchmysite.net: Building a simple search for non-commercial websites

Introducing https://searchmysite.net : a new model for a search engine, indexing only user-submitted sites, and promoting advert-free results. more...