One of the weirdest corners of the Internet is suddenly hard to find on Bing, after the search engine inexplicably started blocking approximately 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities.
Founded in 2013 to archive the “aesthetic awesomeness” of GeoCities websites, Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art, niche fandoms, and special expertise—or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online—Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page. Delighted visitors discovering these sites are more likely to navigate by hovering flashing pointers over a web of spinning GIFs than clicking a hamburger menu or infinitely scrolling.
That’s the style of Internet that Kyle Drake, Neocities’ founder, strives to maintain. So he was surprised when he noticed that Bing was curiously blocking Neocities sites last summer. At first, the issue seemed resolved by contacting Microsoft, but after receiving more recent reports that users were struggling to log in, Drake discovered that another complete block was implemented in January. Even more concerning, he saw that after delisting the front page, Bing had started pointing users to a copycat site where he was alarmed to learn they were providing their login credentials.
Monitoring stats, Drake was stunned to see that Bing traffic had suddenly dropped from about half a million daily visitors to zero. He immediately reported the issue using Bing webmaster tools. Concerned that Bing was not just disrupting traffic but possibly also putting Neocities users at risk if bad actors were gaming search results, he hoped for a prompt resolution.
“This one site that was just a copy of our front page, I didn’t know if it was a phishing attack or what it was, I was just like, ‘whoa, what the heck?’” Drake told Ars.