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searchmysite.net is 6 years old today! It is also a year since the last blog entry , so a good time for another update. 
 Talk at the 7th International Open Search Symposium in October 2025 
 The biggest news from the past year is that I was invited to talk at the 7th International Open Search Symposium in Helsinki on 10 Oct 2025, as part of their Industry Track on Alternative Search…
Today marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of searchmysite.net, and it is also a year since the last blog entry (which was the Four year retrospective ), so now seems a good time to summarise progress. 
 Repositioning searchmysite.net as a personal website search 
 The original objective of searchmysite.net was the ambitious “search just the good stuff” (it even indexed…
Today is the 4 year anniversary of searchmysite.net (the open source search engine for the indieweb / small web / digital gardens, which heavily downranks pages with adverts, and aims to pay running costs via a listing fee and search-as-a-service), so that seems a good point for a quick update on its current status. 
 Highlights from the past year 
 The biggest and most exciting news from…
Milestones 
 
 17 Jul 2020 - the first site submitted by a real user and indexed . 
 12 Mar 2022 - the 1000th site , around 20 months later. 
 15 Dec 2023 - the 2000th site, roughly 21 months after the 1000th. 
 
 The 2,000th site indexed by searchmysite.net is… 
 paulrobichaux.com . Many thanks for submitting! 
 How many sites could searchmysite.net contain?…
Some exciting news, first hinted at in the Three year retrospective : the searchmysite.net redesign has been launched, thanks to its first major open source contributor Lucas Gramajo. 
 First major open source contributor 
 Just to clarify, there have been other open source contributors to searchmysite.net before. The first was Binyamin , who contributed the favicon on 23 Oct 2020. And…
Today is the 3 year anniversary 1 of searchmysite.net (the open source search engine for the indieweb / small web / digital gardens, which heavily downranks pages with adverts, and aims to pay running costs via a listing fee and search-as-a-service), so that seems like a good opportunity for a quick recap of progress so far and hints at what is likely ahead. 
 Progress so far 
 Highlights…
Running costs 
 This is a short post comparing previous running costs on AWS and current running costs on Hetzner. Previous posts with details of running costs are searchmysite.net: The delicate matter of the bill from Jan 2021, and the Escalating running costs section in the searchmysite.net retrospective and future plans from Jan 2022. 
 AWS 
 
 
 
 Month 
 Cost 
…
A quick summary of the new web feed for all search results 
 All search results pages (including Newest Pages and Browse Sites) now have a web feed icon in the top middle next to the results count (in between the Filters and Sort by). Clicking this takes you to an OpenSearch Atom format web feed 1 for that query. 
 This allows you to, for example: 
 
 Subscribe to new posts about…
This is a quick post summarising the simplified site listing workflow and search as a service improvements. 
 Why the site listing workflow needed simplifying 
 The old site listing workflow was suprisingly complicated, with a number of different routes through the process, and the ability to restart and take a different route at a later date. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues,…
This post is to provide an update on the automated SEO searches issue described in my last post Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots . It references the discussion on Hacker News (HN) from Mon 16 May. 
 Traffic and system performance and stability 
 In terms of traffic, there were 18,034 visitors to blog.searchmysite.net on Mon 16 May and 2,699…
Introduction 
 searchmysite.net was launched nearly 2 years ago to help people discover all the great original content on personal and independent websites which is so hard to find now that the major search engines have become swamped by SEO spam. It employed a number of novel techniques to try to avoid the same fate, such as having a community-driven curation and moderation layer, heavily…
The 1,000th site indexed by searchmysite.net is… 
 weeklymusings.net run by scottnesbitt.online : 
 
 It was submitted and indexed on Monday 7 March 2022. (The 1,001st site indexed was uh.edu/engines .) 
 It was part of a flurry of new submissions, thanks largely to the mention at hubme.it/search-my-site . 
 Note that it is the 1,000th site indexed rather than submitted.…
Priorities for 2022 
 As detailed in the searchmysite.net retrospective and future plans , one of the priorities for 2022 was moving to a cheaper hosting provider (another was to spend less time writing blog entries, hence this being a brief post). 
 Cheaper hosting 
 I had hoped to use fosshost.org, but unfortunately they’re not taking new projects. Of the paid alternatives, I…
Introduction 
 It has been around 1.5 years since I launched searchmysite.net as a side-project to try and address the problems with the current commercial internet search offerings, and I reckon I’ve now spent around 650 hours working on it 1 . The 2021 year end seems a good opportunity for a retrospective of what has gone well, what has gone neither well nor not so well, and what has…
So I’ve finally managed to index Wikipedia , or at least the 6,392,807 English language pages . 
 Some of the benefits this brings to searchmysite.net: 
 
 It turns it into a much more useful search engine for day-to-day usage. Many of my internet searches in the past have simply ended with clicks to Wikipedia, so now when I’m performing that sort of search I can use…
One of the objectives of searchmysite.net - indexing just good quality content 
 It is a truth universally acknowledged that most of the modern internet is rubbish. Even Google appears to index trillions of pages 1 but only saves around “hundreds of billions” 2 in their search index, suggesting even they chuck most of it out. 
 The approach searchmysite.net takes is to try to…
Introduction 
 This is just a quick update on progress. Since the last post on 30 Jan 2021 I have: 
 
 Been checking the new submissions on a daily basis and approving/rejecting accordingly. 
 Been checking and responding to emails. 
 Made a couple of minor maintenance releases, primarily bug fixes - details at https://github.com/searchmysite/searchmysite.net/releases . 
…
Introduction 
 searchmysite.net is an open source search engine and search as a service for personal and independent websites. The first users began submitting sites on 17 July 2020, and it has been growing steadily since then. It is a bootstrapped side-project, so currently receives no external funding. Furthermore, it does not plan to fund itself with advertising , unlike pretty much every…
searchmysite.net is an open source search engine and search as a service for personal and independent websites, which has a unique approach to advertising to try to tackle spam. I mentioned this approach to advertising in my last post . While this attracted a lot of positivity, it also unfortunately got some negativity 1 , so I thought I’d write a quick post to clarify my position on…
Introduction 
 I used the quote “talk is cheap, show me the code” in the introduction to my first post on searchmysite.net . Well, here it is: https://github.com/searchmysite/searchmysite.net/ . 
 Why aren’t other search engines open source? 
 Pretty much every other search engine treats their inner workings as a closely guarded secret. This is to stop the spammers…
Introduction to relevancy tuning for searchmysite.net 
 This post contains details of the most recent round of relevancy tuning for searchmysite.net. I’ve decided to dedicate a whole post to the subject, given how important but under-appreciated the topic is. 
 It is surprisingly difficult to find much good information about relevancy tuning on the internet, unless it is hidden away…
Introduction 
 Keen-eyed observers may have noticed that the Analytics section on the Privacy Policy has recently been updated. I thought it would be worth a short post with further information. 
 The original web anlytics solution 
 Hopefully it goes without saying that some form of web analytics is useful even for a privacy aware site like searchmysite.net , because you really need…
Introduction 
 In my last major post, searchmysite.net update: Seeding and scaling from 25 Sept 2020, I concluded “I’ll ease off on enhancements, and try to focus on adoption for a while”. So how has that gone? Well, I had a nice burst of activity between 16 and 19 Oct, with 215 sites submitted in 4 days, which was great and led to some really useful feedback, including the…
Welcome 
 Welcome to the first post on searchmysite.net’s new blog. Well the first one first posted on this blog - there are actually some earlier posts which I’ve copied over from my personal site where they were first published: 
 
 searchmysite.net: Building a simple search for non-commercial websites (18 Jul 2020) 
 searchmysite.net update: Seeding and scaling (25…
Introduction 
 This post shows how I added a simple search page to my personal website with searchmysite.net . You can click on it and try it out via the Search link at the top of any page on my site. Note that it is very simple. 
 I know I don’t really need search functionality given that my personal website only currently has a few posts, but I wanted to test the process out and…
Introduction 
 It has been just over 2 months since I launched https://searchmysite.net . I’ve had some good feedback from the IndieWeb community in that time, and made some key changes as a result, so thought it was time for an update. You may still want to refer to searchmysite.net: Building a simple search for non-commercial websites for the original overview. 
 The main changes…
Introduction 
 I’ve written previously about what went wrong with the internet and how to fix it , and one of the ideas I mentioned was a new model for search. Given “talk is cheap, show me the code”, I decided to implement it. Okay, it wasn’t quite that easy, but here it is: https://searchmysite.net . 
 The key features are that it: 
 
 Contains only sites…
![](https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/milestone-1000th-site-indexed/"https://blog.searchmysite.net/images/posts/1000thsite-small.gif")