One of my favorite websites is the Cheapskate's Guide, run by a curmudgeonly fellow who wants to put inexpensive computing power into everybody's hands, and more power to him! The fact that he too uses a pink. red, and black color scheme, just like me, does add great charm to his site, I'll admit.
Now, the Cheapskate is also a free-speech absolutist and someone who fights the tyranny of Big Social Media and government control of the free Web. I happen to care about those issues myself, sure, though maybe a tenth as much as the Cheapskate. What fascinates me more are his articles on the Indie Web, that is, the Internet like it was in the late 1990s, before social media, when everybody and her mother had a hand-coded HTML page, complete with "under construction" animated gifs and . Back when the Cool Site of the Day was a thing, And "Kiss Me Mahar" and "Mr. T Ate My Balls" were the first memes. Back then, before social media, before "walled gardens," everybody was a publisher — and "Netizens," as Wired Magazine liked to call us, were going to inherit the earth in a wave of grass-roots democracy and Burning-Man-style techno-anarchy, wielding the power of the Blogosphere.
I know, I'm an old grognard, and this is all ancient history to the kiddies. But it turns out that the days of yore are not all gone! Heck, witness this site you are "enjoying" right now, built of hand-coded html, raw venting, and love's labor, not quite lost. The Cheapskate's site is an Indie site too. Ad free, open to anybody, not beholden to any corporate masters. Here are some of his Indie Web articles, highly recommended:
But one of his most recent articles, Big Tech May have Already Fielded a New Weapon Against the Small Internet: AI, was more pessimistic. He suggests that big search engines, powered by artificial ntelligence and a lack of accountability, are blocking Indie Web pages. I'm not saying he's wrong, but I wanted to see how *I'M* doing. So I opened up what Gemini told me were the top ten search engines, and got to work searching. [Yes, I appreciate the irony of asking an AI which search engines to try, but I figured a skewed sample, if it were skewed, would serve my purpose better. And FWIW, I do not think it was a skewed sample.]
Here are the results of my very limited sampling:
|
wemic |
cayzle |
liontaur |
| AOL |
7 |
1 |
7 |
| Ask |
NA |
NA |
NA |
| Baidu |
3 |
1 |
7 |
| Bing |
7 |
1 |
6 |
| DuckDuckGo |
8 |
1 |
5 |
| Ecosia |
6 |
1 |
6 |
| Google |
5 |
1 |
6 |
| Naver |
NA |
1 |
NA |
| Yahoo |
NA |
1 |
7 |
| Yandex |
10 |
1 |
7 |
In the table above, the number is my placement order on the first page of results. Aside from Ask.com, which seems to be a paid advertsing vehicle, the results were pretty darn reasonable, I think. Sorry, Cheapskate, but at least in my poorly populated corner of the Internet, I'm seeing no sign that Big Search is fussing about little ol' me. Course, my very innocuous content is not likely to raise any artificially intelligent eyebrows. YMMV.
