But this was indeed a great time. Remember being on a social network ca 1999 and people used it as a diary where others could comment, give advice and meet others with similar interests. There was a timeline and posts from people you "followed". I think it didn't have likes or ratings though. Most people were super friendly and we were doing meet ups, so very much everyone knew each other. At peak time there was about 20k people and at that point owners couldn't cope with it. With that amount of people you'll find some nasty ones that will ruin it for everyone else and that's what happened. Owners couldn't afford to host it, so they were doing crowdfunding to cover the server costs and maintenance. Some bitter people didn't like that and started making unfounded accusations of theft or that they will report everything to the tax man and the police. So owners eventually closed it.
Point is, I don't think SEO at the time was any more or less "aggressive", per se. Just different. And clearly, the game has since escalated altogether.
What's the elevator pitch? What do you actually do that is special?
From the about section:
> This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
> The software for this search engine is all custom-built, and all crawling and indexing is done in-house. The project is open source. Feel free to poke about in the source code or contribute to the development!
But that doesn't really give me much info.
For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. I also do a personalized pagerank biased toward the blogosphere. The likelihood your website shows up in the results is directly determined by whether real humans link to the website.
It's not a Google replacement by any measure, it's meant as a complement, but if you are looking for more in-depth content on a topic than you can find elsewhere, it's often a good starting point.
What about sites built with React, etc? Like would you be filtering out cool things like Ableton's "Learning Synths"[1] or do you mostly mean third party scripts?
Do babies go out with the bathwater? Almost certainly. But when you're running a small scale search engine, you're never going to index everything anyway, so that's entirely fine.
FWIW I think it is cool and much needed.
(also low value, perhaps :)
I was going to suggest that perhaps adding info about whether the site had ads, etc. might help the usability. Then I tried marginalia ... :) Perhaps we need to invest in similar detection for other antipatterns (listicles, blogspam etc.) - this is mostly what I was talking about. Less the understanding for indexing, and more the classification for user safety and authenticity of results.
But again, this is very cool.
I don't know how useful these "hobo signs" actually are, but they did feel like a natural response to a lot of web sites justifying their use of trackers and cookies and affiliate links and whatnot with "everyone is doing this!"
About ~5k USD total investment including a small UPS, operational costs are $40/mo. Doesn't actually require all that much maintenance, at least not compared to the work I've put into building a search engine (including crawler, index) from scratch.
Well, I built sort of exactly this: https://search.marginalia.nu/
It's not great, but it sure has its moments.
Should be noted, regarding Koh Lanta, that travel is one of the most aggressively SEO-spammed topics, along with pharma and online casinos. It's extremely difficult to cut through the noise and reach any sort of signal.