this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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264
There’s a new “Google Jail” for independent wikis (weirdgloop.org)
submitted 1 day ago by lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] zeezee@slrpnk.net 11 points 13 hours ago

i think their guess is right on the money

My best guess (and to be clear, this is a guess): Google decided they could no longer effectively identify and swat away SEO slop, and figured that just massively nerfing brand new domains was their next best option.

this makes a lot of sense if you've tried searching for literally anything nowadays – most of the results are generated AI slop for the specific keywords you've searched for – can only imagine the nightmare if you could do this for a whole domain subtree – such a shame that because of slop actually useful wikis have to suffer – abs atrocious

[–] prof@infosec.pub 16 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Check out Indie Wiki Buddy: https://getindie.wiki/

This replaces fandom wikis and such with their independent counterparts. Especially useful for Warframe and similar stuff...

[–] nightlily@leminal.space 1 points 9 hours ago

It’s nice we‘re getting some community structures back that existed in the pre-social media era. Maybe we won’t be so quick to let them go this time.

[–] Widdershins@lemmy.world 14 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

How the hell does fandom exist as a top result every time but exist as an absolute shit source of information also every time?

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 11 points 15 hours ago

Google prioritizes slop.

[–] Wataba@sh.itjust.works 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I use extensions that auto direct away from Wikia (dont validate them stealing a term they have no right to), and block the wikia link for good measure. If there isn't an alternative, such as for very minor stuff, then I make do with the slop and heavy filtering.

Push for auto redirectors. They will help in steering people to fresh wiki and bypassing this shit.

[–] kalpol@lemmy.ca 7 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

This is really when the old web rings would be nice to have back. It was a web because sites linked to each other. Less efficient but at least things could be found, versus the gated access we have now.

[–] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip 20 points 22 hours ago

The problem with Google is that they made the best version of their product in the first try. All they could do from there would be making it worse.

[–] justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io 38 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, this has been for a while now.

When Digital Extremes made and hosted their own wiki for Warframe instead of the fandom one, you had to directly search the main page of their wiki from Google instead of just searching.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

it didn't take long for search engines, including google, to pick up wiki.warframe.com though, as it was just a sub off an existing and long-standing domain.. the hard part was getting pages on the new address to rank higher than the old one that fandom won't delete.

what you should do for any wiki is add the wiki's search as a search engine in your browser. firefox makes it easy to do. just go to the wiki (i.e. wiki.warframe.com), right-click in the search box on that page, choose 'add search engine'. add a 'keyword' to make searching it easy (e.g. wf), so now all you have to do to search the warframe wiki is type in firefox's address box, example: wf void trader

[–] riot@fedia.io 57 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well, this explains the experience I had with the poe2 wiki 2 months ago. I could only find the poe1 wiki and thought it was so damn weird that there wasn't one for the sequel. Then a week or so later, a reddit thread had a comment to the poe2 wiki, and I was so confused why it hadn't shown up, when I specifically searched for it. smh. Glad to have that mystery solved!

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

I have switched to DuckDuckgo and while their index is crap, it's at least has more crap than what Google has.

DuckDuckgo I believe leases the Bing engine so I am still trying others.

also now I am using the direct search engines for specific sites... eg '@wiki ' to use Wikipedias onwn search.

[–] kalpol@lemmy.ca 3 points 17 hours ago

Searxng was working pretty well for me until everyone started blocking even my own instance.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Try dogpile.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

so wierd to hear that in this millenium.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 2 points 10 hours ago

I know but its still there and its still so good.

[–] kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 14 points 1 day ago

ddg uses the bing web crawler to index pages but then applies its own sorting algorithm for search results

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 3 points 1 day ago

My experience has been the opposite. Often I have to turn to Google to get the results I want.

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Startpage uses Google's index, or used to. At very least, it seems to have more and different results than DuckDuckGo.

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

Oh interesting, Startpage looks like it has access to Google's image search dataset and possibly their crazy ass vector basesd mobius strip index system

[–] buffalobuffalo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

i have this problem. I use ddg sometimes to find wiki info, and if the piece of info is too new, ddg just gives me some clearly vibe-coded page with bogus information.

last week i waded through like 6 fake fields of Mistria wikis on the first page of ddg before giving up and finding the "official" ones on Google

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Apologies if you already know this. Sharing because if you're spending a lot of time searching a game wiki, this can be really convenient.

You can setup your browser for typing '@mistria juniper' would bring up the wiki search page for everything related to that character.

disclaimer: I think Chromium can do this too

If you are often referring to a wiki, you can temporarily add it as a search engine to your browser's internal location search bar.

With FireFox -> Settings -> Search -> "Add search engine" in the "Additional search engines"

I picked a random mistria wiki and the URL would be

https://fieldsofmistria.wiki.gg/wiki/Special:Search?search=%25s&go=Go&ns0=1 for searching.

For name '@mistria' should be unique enough.

I got that by typing "test" in the search box to get this "https://fieldsofmistria.wiki.gg/wiki/Special:Search?search=Test&go=Go&ns0=1" just swap out the 'Test' for '%s'

Now press ctrl + l to focus on the location/search bar and type "@mistria juniper" to get an in wiki search results for everything related to that character.

One exception. if the url has something like 'nonce=a4F7DEF' or other hex crap, it is probably not going to work and may get your IP temporarily blocked.

[–] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Custom searches are awesome! There might be an even easier way:

With Firefox, most of the time, you can right-click a web page's search box and choose "Add Search Engine," and you'll get a box allowing you to give the search a name and a search bar keyword. Which you can edit later with Settings -> Search if needed.

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 1 points 11 hours ago

Great suggestion and it works more often than not.

[–] Sims@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 day ago

The whole Alphabet group are one big mis-information hub. They also support Genocide and 'The Trump'. Wether it is censoring sites/people that disagree with US elites, or if they are pushing information seekers to their own controlled information garden, or western corporate eco-systems, we all need to get rid of them.

[–] graphito@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 day ago

Yeah, googling Astroneer wiki always refer to fandom.com and omits official wiki.gg

[–] make@mastodontti.fi -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@lemmydividebyzero
Propably just showing AI answers first and not bothering with actual page where the data is hoarded from…

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

That's very clearly not what is happening.