Before you say haha no one is using bing... Your beloved DuckDuckGo uses bing results and this means it's censored there too. And it's not only about the start page https://neocities.org/ (which can be found with DuckDuckGo via Wikipedia Snippet). None of the hosted sites are in the index.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Well is that true? I searched duckduckgo and kagi something and neocities and both gave results. Bing did not.
Edit: Seems like I got lucky with search terms. Often it returns nothing the more terms I try. The AI tool in ddg always returns sites so thats weird.
Well whateever, I switched to Kagi anyways.
I chose a random neocities website and searched with both DDG and Google. The search was "irony machine neocities" without quotes. Google yielded a result which pointed to the correct URL https://irony-machine.neocities.org/ while DDG did not.
irony machine neocities
My first duckduckgo result was a scam result site for that domain to check if it was safe, lol.
Second result was the creators website page that linked back to neocities.
The duckduck AI result at the top however was a direct link to the neocities page. Interesting.
Kagi's results were first result was the link.
I concede though, it is hit and miss with Duckduckgo, even doing site:neocities.org
Interesting, if i do site:neocities.org with a random search term e.g. site:neocities.org anime in DDG I get zero results. In google, this yields thousands of neocities subdomains. Do you get any relevant results in DDG this way?
Yeah, I see that. I must have just been lucky with my choice of search terms. I concede, its worse. The AI function shows them though, which is due to it crawling the tags? I don't know.
I havent used google in a long time, I switched to Kagi and it works.
Probably depends on what AI DDG is using... I switched DDG to noai so I don't see any generated results
...people use Bing?
*checks browser marketshare...
Ha, Bing doesn't even have 5% marketshare.
Oh no, Firefox has less than half of Bing's marketshare. Fuck me, what's wrong with internet users. I know Firefox isn't perfect, but there's other forks of it for various use-cases.
Dick Duck Go gets its search results from Bing.
IIRC that's just one of the backends they use for their results
I just opened neocities.org with it, but nothing specific.
For normies Chrome IS the internet.
"Normies" don't use PCs anymore. Whatever apps the phone vendor preinstalled, Web or other, is the internet.
You’re probably too young to remember that in an old version of windows, Internet Explorer’s desktop icon was labeled “The Internet”. Nowadays, people think Google is “the internet”. My boomer dad says he “has Gemini”… bruh, you’re just searching shit on Google.
Well, I'm 44 so I do remember those days, but I used to be a Netscape user, so there's that.
This also applies to the results on Duckduckgo so I assume this affects a lot of people here.
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...people use Geocities?
Over 1.5 million Neocities websites; Geocities, however, is dead.
Oh. Whups.
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Wouldn't want unmoderated* information and opinions appearing in Microslop search results now would you?
*unmoderated by Big Tech Fascist AI Filters
Bing/DDG has also blocked the emulation wiki (https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/) for some reason. I noticed when I forgot the domain and tried looking for the site.
For the record, Google returns it as the top result.
Why?
Man, who could hate Neocities? There’s so many gorgeous “retro” websites on there. Brings me back to my childhood.
laughs in Kagi
Money bags over here is laughing at us
The price of one coffee a month. Bling bling, mothafuckas!
Kagi is $10 a month for the decent (not weirdly limited) plan. That's a hell of an expensive coffee.
Ok, two coffees.
Just giving you shit, though I have always hated the "cup of coffee" comparison as I think people buying those expensive coffees out all the time are being foolish. Coffee at home is much better and much cheaper IMO.
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5 dollars buys me a week of coffee.
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laughs I at least my search results aren't tied to a credit card holder which identifies me
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So, going by the blog post, the entire domain got sanctioned due to a few (proportionally speaking) malicious domains?
If so, wtf 💩
Also, for things like this, I'd suggest linking to sites one uses (Neocities or otherwise) between one's friends and followers so discovery of sites flow through the chain of trust. Not as fast discoverable, but avoids algorhithm decisions like this, or shadow ban, or ill-intended sites paying to appear higher, or so on.
I was hoping qwant, with its own (partial) search index, would be immune to it, but searching for neocities also doesn't show any results for neocities.org there unfortunately, or at least it did not for me.
will ig am switching off DDG
Startpage seems nice. Uses sanitized results from Google and while it does have an AI feature, it's opt-in (not out) and looks to also be sanitized.
I want to (try) relying less on Google And Microsoft so I decided to try mojeek.
Mojeek was a huge miss for me. Search results were mostly irrelevant to my search queries. I've yet to find any search engine that isn't trash, though.
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It has sponsored results though.
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Looks like its showing in the DDG results for me this evening.
While I think it's shitty that they did this, part of me also kind of likes it. The most resilient form of web behavior includes bookmarking sites and discovering new sites by them linking to each other, rather than getting all your sites from a search engine. I get that search engines are useful for lots of things. But maybe this will help kick people's search engine addiction if they realize there's lots of good stuff out there that you can't trust a search engine to surface.
We need a "Fedi-Search engine"
searxng.org
Yes I do think something like this would be nice. We don't need one giga search engine with a huge index of everything. Specialized search engines with genre specific indices would be more individually maintainable, and diverse
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