My key takeaways: 1. Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots 2. In summary, if they break through the current reverse p

My key takeaways: 1. Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots 2. In summary, if they break through the current reverse proxy level protection, options include an invisible ReCAPTCHA (but given I’ve sometimes 160,000 requests a day I’d be well over the 1,000,000 a month free tier limit), requiring JavaScript as per the web analytics or some Cross Site Request Forgery style protection (but those would place much more load on the servers), or CloudFlare (but the searchmysite.net spider is still currently blocked by CloudFlare as per Some of the challenges of building an internet search) 3. If you were into conspiracy theories you could claim that the major search engines were trying to stifle the competition, but a more realistic explanation is simply that searchmysite.net is being drowned out by SEO spam 4. If I’d had a decent amount of real users visiting and never returning I could reasonably conclude that updating the blog wasn’t the most productive use of my time and effort, but without any real users in the first place it is hard to gauge whether people like it or not My own independent search engine, https://www.locserendipity.com https://www.locserendipity.com, is seeing similar trends.