Why you should stop using Google search | Switching to Microsoft Bing, Yandex | My story of web development, search engines and SEO.
I’ve been developing websites since 2008, but my first attempts to learn XML actually date back to 1999. I was under 18 and incredibly fortunate to meet a very wealthy man who had his own department of programmers. They built programs and websites for him; he even owned a street in my city! At that time, I worked as a computer technician after school, repairing and building computers.
He invited me to his office and showed me a book with “XML” in its title. Back then, very few people knew about this book, and he possessed one of the first copies. He told me to take it and “try to do something.” I saw it as a golden opportunity to join the cutting edge of web development. He gave me two weeks to study the book and demonstrate my talent. He extended the deadline by another two weeks because, well, it wasn’t that easy for me!
A month later, I presented him with a webpage featuring buttons — a sort of push-button menu where you could select computer parts. He looked at it, praised me, and then showed me what his programmers were creating. When he introduced his real estate website with a menu allowing users to choose a country, region, type of real estate, and so on, I realized I was still incredibly far from that level.
A few years later, I joined the army, but I never forgot my dream. In the army, I was lucky to meet guys involved in programming. While my official role was in electrical work, I spent all my free evenings with them, trying to absorb everything I could. That’s how I learned to play the guitar and write programs in VB6. After my service, I happily returned to civilian life.
My friend once told me about PHP. He claimed it was a fantastic language, user-friendly, and that he’d learned it in literally one day! He showed me how to set up a home web server. At that time, we didn’t know about WAMP/LAMP stacks; he simply showed me Apache and how to configure PHP and MySQL. It took him a week to get everything working. Thanks to his guidance, I managed to set it up myself in just 24 hours once I got home.
I then dreamed of exploring everything possible with PHP, but the culmination came a few years later during a conversation with my friend who was studying computer science in college. We often spent evenings at his house with a group of people, and one day I told him about a singleton I had created in PHP. He was one of the best programmers I knew, and I’d learned a lot from him. But at that moment, he looked at me and said, “My friend, if you understood how PHP works and what a singleton is, you would understand that a singleton can’t work in PHP.”
And if you think about it, he was right to some extent. His words made me uneasy, but I knew I couldn’t be wrong because I had tested it, and it worked. So I suggested he check it out if he didn’t believe me. He had a look on his face — he didn’t want to humiliate me, but since I insisted, he couldn’t resist the temptation to prove his point.
So, he typed a singleton class on his laptop and created an example to demonstrate that the database connection would always be new when pressing F5, and no PHP singleton class could change this, because “that’s how PHP works,” right? I’m sure for many of you, understanding this scenario might be mind-blowing. When he saw that a singleton did work in PHP, he couldn’t believe it. He checked his code, convinced there had to be a mistake somewhere! But there wasn’t one, and then he had to admit that it worked! Later, he quickly forgot about this incident, but I will remember it for the rest of my life. Since then, I’ve used this class in all my projects that require working with a database.
I tell this story so that anyone who has the patience to read it, and doesn’t know me personally, will have at least an idea of the path I’ve traveled. Many years have passed since then, and after maximizing my potential with PHP, I found myself switching to Python. For those who aren’t aware, there’s a popular “holy war” in certain circles: “Which is better, PHP or Python?”
I decided to push myself to learn Python because PHP’s multithreading was essentially “pseudo-multithreading.” While it worked well, and I even set a personal record for the number of internet connections (requests) per second, it became clear I needed to find ways to further increase that result, and it simply couldn’t be done in PHP. That’s when I considered trying Python. I had tried Java, and the result was frankly disappointing. I spent two years studying Python while coding my projects, only to realize that this kind of thing should really be done in Golang. A sad ballad of me and Python, indeed.
Over the years, I’ve written quite a few projects. One of the most challenging was probably triangular arbitrage, though there were many interesting ones. I was doing sport arbitrage back when VB6 was the only language I knew. But the laws and financial complexities made it impossible to earn good money from it, so I had to consider other options.
By 2008, when I was already building websites for myself, my relatives, and writing projects for college students for money, it was clear that beyond protecting my websites, marketing was an important aspect. Of course, there’s also web design, which I always tend to ignore, but as the title suggests, we’ll talk about SEO.
After reading a few articles from Google search, I initially thought that to promote a website, you needed to pay $200 a month to get on the first page of a search engine. With many search engines, each requiring payment, it seemed daunting. At that time, I had no real experience in promoting my website, so I started preparing and optimizing the projects I wanted to promote. I won’t list the numerous pitfalls along the way; that’s a different story.
Those who have gone through this know that you probably shouldn’t believe articles found on the first page of Google search. The best information is rarely there. You can read my previous publications to find out how I discovered one of the best web hostings ever — and no, it wasn’t on the first page of Google search. It’s not there. While it used to be that those diligent enough to search could find unique, useful things, now everything is much worse. Many valuable pages are no longer found in Google search.
Over the years, I’ve developed a habit of saving links to interesting finds in a separate file, not in favorites or bookmarks, because they sometimes disappear from there too. For example, I still have a link to a list of proxy servers that can no longer be found via Google search. How to search correctly is a different story, which I may tell someday to those of you who are interested.
Recently, one of my projects finally reached the first page of a search engine. No, it wasn’t Google search. I’m less popular on Google search than others. I don’t know why, and frankly, I have no desire to find out why Google is doing such a terribly bad job these days. But the facts speak for themselves: Bing and Yandex work the way you would expect Google should. You can waste your money trying to get to the first page on Google, while on Bing and Yandex, I managed to do it for free, just by using my SEO skills.
Here you can see nostrwat.ch as the second result on the first page of Microsoft Bing for a keyword found in the main page’s title and description
Yandex, on the other hand, is doing even better, surprisingly
And only Google doesn’t show my website at all, no matter what. Although they did send me a letter the other day.
A very touching letter. I checked today; my site is not on Google search. It’s simply not there. Period.
I hope I managed to save at least one person from all the difficulties that befell me. With that, good luck and all the best!
Honestly, I’m kinda tired of messing with it — so if you wanna improve it, feel free to contribute!
https://github.com/vir2alexport/crowdsec-mon
Starts with
^man — for all symbols that starts with “man”
Ends with
man$ — for symbols that ends with “man”
Escaping characters
If you want to search for special characters you have to escape them with a backslash first. For example, when you want to find all the symbols with round brackets in description you should do like so: \(.*\)
To escape asterisk just type: \*
Groups and ranges
To search the symbols that starts with a letter from “a” to “c” or “d” to “f”,
type: ^[a-c|d-f]
For “hand” without letter “s” type: hand[^s]
in the example above ^ works as exclusion, not a starts with
Quantifiers
Let’s say you want to find symbols with a double o’s,
like so: o{2}
you can type instead: oo (which gives the exact same result)
But to search for equal or more than two numbers in a row, you do need quantifiers,
type: \d{2,}
Assertions
There are 4 types of assertions: look ahead , look behind, negative look ahead and negative look behind
look ahead: man(?=.woman) , matches “man” only if “man” followed by “woman” with any single character in-between
look behind: (?<=woman).man , matches “woman” only if “woman” followed by “man” with any single character in-between
negative look ahead: woman(?!man) , matches “woman” only if “woman” not followed by “man”
negative look behind: (?<!man)woman
So if you want to search let’s say a “raised” followed by “hand”
type: raised(=?.*hand) , matches “raised” only if “raised” followed by “hand” with a set of any characters in-between
I will share some more examples later. Stay tuned.