Reports that more than 99.9% of users were spambots in open source search engines

While major search engines have been swamped by SEO spam, searchmysite.net is an open source search engine for searching personal and independent websites. The official searchmysite.net blog reports that search engine optimization (SEO) spam bots accounted for 100% of searchmysite.net users.

Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots
https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/almost-all-searches-on-my-independent-search-engine-are-now-from-seo-spam-bots/

searchmysite.net is a search engine launched around 2020. On major search engines, SEO spam pushes personal sites out of the search results, making them very difficult to reach. Therefore, searchmysite.net seems to have adopted various methods, such as introducing community-driven curation and moderation, and significantly lowering the search rank of pages containing advertisements to reduce incentives for SEO spam. .

But the problem is spambots. These are spam bots that are designed to get search engines to visit specific sites to improve search rankings, and access search engines as programmed.

Below is a summary of the number of users of searchmysite.net for the 11 days from May 1 to May 11, 2022. 'Real Users' is the number of human users, 'Spam bots' is the number of spam bot users, and '%age spam' is the spam bot user rate. The spambot rate has already exceeded 99.9%, and finally reached 100% on May 11th.

According to searchmysite.net, the number of users has increased dramatically since mid-April 2022. Searchmysite.net has introducedan original analytics system , but this method only displays human users, and abnormal activity could not be recognized without checking server logs.

According to searchmysite.net, most of the few human users in the first place visit searchmysite.net from links such as Hacker News on social news sites, and it seems that there is almost no traffic from other search engines. In other words, the sudden increase in users is likely to be a bot.

Looking at the server log, the IP address, user agent, and search query were all different, so at first I thought that another search engine was scraping the results, or I was under DDoS attack. that's right. However, a closer look revealed that most of the search queries followed a pattern, which was attributed to black hat SEO spam bots.

searchmysite.net said, ``I don't agree with the conspiracy theory, but I can't help but think that there is some truth in the 'Internet of Death' theory.What is the 'Internet of Death' theory? The idea is that it's empty and has no real people, where bots talk to bots to generate content and clicks, everything that matters is shared by bots, and bots get their share of the ever-growing ad revenue. But the reality is that we're still far from there: there are still real people doing great things on the internet, whether other people know they exist or not. I know, but I am genuinely concerned that my project to connect these people may have had unintended negative consequences.'