There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.
Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.
Hmm. Using the search term “small website discoverability crisis” . . .
On duckduckgo: original website is the third result (after what looks like a SEO firm’s longform ad and ycombinator) without quotes and the first result with.
On startpage: original is the first result even without quotes
On mojeek: original is the first result even without quotes
I do not have accounts with any of these search engines and do not allow them to run Javascript or set cookies, although it’s possible that duckduckgo may have noticed that someone with my ip often makes highly specific searches and looks at the long-tail results.
My conclusion from that, combined with other people’s searches surfacing large sites first, is that the results you receive can be significantly distorted by the search engine’s algorithm. Google in particular is likely trying to direct traffic to its advertising customers and should be avoided for that reason.
first result now in ddg
First result on mojeek! Sounds like discovery of the site is great then
Point is, people are using the wrong tools to look for stuff. So it’s a social problem more than a technical one. Those are always the most difficult type to solve.
The only problem is that we need to change the behavior of about four billion people
Well, do you think that it’s realistic that the average user types that into the search engine’s website ? When you already know the exact title of the post on that website, you probable already know the full URL and don’t need a search engine. So, that has nothing to do with “discovering” in my opinion, which the blog post is about.
there’s at least 3 layers of finding stuff: