Homecoming Servers no longer showing up on Google search/Chrome?

[Force Redux]

Kind of a broad problem, but has this ever happened? I noticed when I search 'COH homecoming forum "Topic"' like i used to, there are no HC forum results with Google/Chrome any more. I don't recall ever filtering out the site...thoughts? I get Reddit, and other COH sites, but not HC. Humph

[Lunar Ronin]

 

 

[Lunar Ronin]

Google (and lol Bing), are not anywhere as good as they used to be.  Try Brave Search, Mojeek, or Kagi.

[Force Redux]

Thanks @Lunar Ronin Appreciate the quick response. I forgot that this issue was going on last year until it bit me in the ass in the last few weeks. I can force it with an advanced search on Google but that's a PITA. Looks like I'm up for one of the other engines then. ty.

[Psyonico]

I feel like someone else just brought up this very topic only a few days ago, and other people chimed in and said it was working for them.

 

I’ve de-googled my life, so I can’t say if it works or not.  I can tell you the official site is the first result for me in duckDuckGo though.

 

you could try using this as your search parameter 

site:homecomingservers.com whatever query

 

and see if that works.

[Glacier Peak]

This is a meta thread. Google search doesn't show Homecoming forums, but searching Homecoming forums shows threads about Google search not showing Homecoming Forums.

 

Edit: Ha @Lunar Ronin beat me to it!

Edited yesterday at 03:20 AM by Glacier Peak

[UltraAlt]

2 hours ago, Force Redux said:

I don't recall ever filtering out the site...thoughts?

 

delete you cookies.

[Cipher]

Hey,

 

Unfortunately, Google pushed a series of updates to how they index and rank websites for Search in March and one of those changes resulted in forums being significantly de-valuated, ours included. The Search Console does not display any issues with crawling and indexing our site, but logs show since May 27th, the number of pages indexed dropped from ~140,000 to just 10,800, and and our impressions have dropped from ~83,000 per day to just 821 today.

 

Other site administrators have been seeing the same thing happening to their websites, both forum and blog based, at the same time as ours, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any solution for it on our end.

[Lunar Ronin]

Yep.  Here's a really good article on how Google changed their search engine to basically destroy the open Internet and anything that isn't big business.

 

TL;DR: Stop using Google search and Bing.  Use one of the three independent search engines.

[tidge]

To further fuel the anti-Google sentiment: It appears (to me) that whatever they did in March includes a new variant of digital finger-printing that will force certain users, under certain conditions, to solve captchas to use the default Google search. For example, I don't have to solve the captchas on one machine (of several) unless that one machine is using a browser in incognito mode. I had another machine start down this path when it was on another network, but it seems like (for the time being) I changed networks/cleared caches/etc. enough to get it off that "list". Ultimately I simply rely on other search engines.

 

I don't have extraordinary measures in play: I use Firefox "strict" policy (except for one service that the mode otherwise breaks), and a handful of common blockers. The only thing I can think of that mimics 'bot behavior' on my end is possibly quickly flipping through sites and leveraging an external text file of bookmarks (as opposed to having them in a browser).

[Force Redux]

Geez.... 🤬

 

Great feedback and info..Ty..😯

[Icono04]

On 6/17/2025 at 3:38 AM, Lunar Ronin said:

Google (and lol Bing), are not anywhere as good as they used to be.  Try Brave Search, Mojeek, or Kagi.

I thought all the other search providers still used either Google's or Bing's indexes anyway, i.e. regardless of one's choice of browser there is still an unavoidable tie-in with either Google or Bing in the background. Did this change, or have I just misunderstood all along?

[Lunar Ronin]

2 hours ago, Icono04 said:

I thought all the other search providers still used either Google's or Bing's indexes anyway, i.e. regardless of one's choice of browser there is still an unavoidable tie-in with either Google or Bing in the background. Did this change, or have I just misunderstood all along?

 

Most web search engines are wrappers for Google search or Bing, yes, (including DuckDuckGo and Startpage).  However, there are four web search engines that use their own crawlers and indexers and are independent from Google search and Bing: Brave Search, Kagi, Mojeek, and Yandex.  I usually recommend Brave Search and Kagi to people, but Mojeek is a decent alternative.

[Ukase]

On 6/16/2025 at 8:38 PM, Lunar Ronin said:

Try Brave

I saw a post of yours a month or so ago about Brave. I had never heard of it. I like it. It was a seamless transition. 

[Maelwys]

FWIW I've found Mojeek tends to always show a decent grouped-up summary of the contents of the HC Forums by default; so that might be a better option if all someone is looking for is a quick replacement for how Google used to work whenever you just type something quickly like "maelwys homecoming forum".
Brave on the other hand seems to prefer showing you a variety of results from across the web rather than focusing in on one particular domain - so you really need to add the "site:" qualifier (like "maelwys site:forums.homecomingservers.com") if you want more focused results.

Haven't tried Kagi.
Yandex searches seem to be laden with random murky bloatware/malware references for some reason.
Swisscows and Gigablast also exist but the former isn't wonderful and the latter is total garbage.
 

Edited 4 hours ago by Maelwys

[Lunar Ronin]

21 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

FWIW I've found Mojeek tends to always show a decent grouped-up summary of the contents of the HC Forums by default; so that might be a better option if all someone is looking for is a quick replacement for how Google used to work whenever you just type something quickly like "maelwys homecoming forum".
Brave on the other hand seems to prefer showing you a variety of results from across the web rather than focusing in on one particular domain - so you really need to add the "site:" qualifier (like "maelwys site:forums.homecomingservers.com") if you want more focused results.

Haven't tried Kagi.
Yandex searches seem to be laden with random murky bloatware/malware references for some reason.
Swisscows and Gigablast also exist but the former isn't wonderful and the latter is total garbage.
 

 

Yeah, that's why I don't recommend Yandex.  Swisscows is just a Bing wrapper, like DuckDuckGo.  Gigablast died two years ago, it no longer exists.

[Maelwys]

11 minutes ago, Lunar Ronin said:

Gigablast died two years ago, it no longer exists.

I wonder if we could convince Dark Watcher to help us resurrect HotBot...? 🤔💀🪄👻

[Psyonico]

3 hours ago, Maelwys said:

I wonder if we could convince Dark Watcher to help us resurrect HotBot...? 🤔💀🪄👻

Anyone remember this guy?