You frame ‘not showing up in search engines’ as a drawback, a downside. What underlies that assumption for you? Could you help me understand it? I don’t share the viewpoint, but I’m still working to understand it.
The logic seems clear to me: if you want people to be able to make use of/benefit from your published knowledge/artifacts you would want people to be able to find it when they are searching for that kind of published knowledge/artifact. People use search engines to perform the search for published knowledge/artifacts. Thus, publishing knowledge/artifacts but restricting them such that they cannot be found is a set of simultaneous contradictory actions.
I'd be curious about your opinion. I have no real love for search engines, but if I'm going to the trouble of putting things on the internet in public vs. just sending them to people directly, presumably it would be because I want people outside of my circle of friends to see it. If you're not out personally marketing/reposting your blog/site places, search engines are pretty much the only other way people would find you.
And even if I saw your site on here, say, and liked it, if I don't bookmark it immediately, I'd still go to a search engine to try to re-find it in the future if I wanted to go back. Not to say you need to be doing paid ads or trying to raise your SEO or whatever, but I've had times where I remember some unique phrase from an article I read years ago and Google can use that to find the original source.
> putting things on the internet in public vs. just sending them to people directly
A large proportion of the resources I host on-prem are just that. Stuff that's too large for email, or isn't static, or may get updated. Unless people host their own email server (like I do), it's going to e.g. Gmrgle anyway if you email it to them. Maybe it gets blocked, maybe it gets fubared.
Uploading it to an on-prem server and sending the link in an email is no more trouble and any issues are easier to debug.
Simple answer is I find search engines mostly useless. There is no investment in curation, compared to site-specific search. I run and have access to a few semi-private curated lists of resources, good enough for most of what I need and certainly for the kinds of resources I (and other like-minded people) host solely on-prem. Furthermore "search engines good" does nothing about the "not good" traffic; it's a not even wrong argument from my POV.
This wasn't some huge technical lift for me to implement. Trust me on that. I got tired of Amazon stinking up my logs and decided that since I can't discriminate based on reliable information about the services being hosted there which have a legitimate need to reach out, I just don't need their help. Really, I'm helping them by ensuring no spurious pongs or SYN/ACKs come from me. See? I'm helping the best I can.
If you think this is heavy-handed and arbitrary, take a close look at email and domain reputation providers sometime.
Need a version of nc which does multicast and is written in python? Well, you can't get that from an Amazon address anymore... unless you've mirrored it. How many people care? How many people care about precinct-level voting patterns for King County Washington from roughly 2005-2009?
It's not a "grand narrative", I've been playing with the internet since it was possible to do so legally. If explaining that history is grandiose for you, that's you. I host on-prem for my convenience and nobody else's. Enjoy the article... or not.
