When I search for “PieFed” on DuckDuckGo, I get the expected results. https://join.piefed.social/ is the first one, of course.

On Google, the first result leads to a 403, and the second one is a Reddit discussion. https://join.piefed.social/ is nowhere to be seen.

Google search as a whole is just completly enshittified nowadays. I remember how i started to use alternatives like DDG or Ecosia 10 years ago and still switched back to Google in 50% of times because it just delivered the results i wanted. About 5 years ago or so Google search became slowly so shitty that i used it maybe twice a week. Nowadays months can go by without Google and when i try it out for a particular hard to find search query i'm always shocked how bad it had become. Like sometimes it doesnt fill even a single page and every single result is utter garbage.

So i'd say Google doesnt hate PieFed. Theye just hate their users and humanity itself probably too.

Edit: The annoying part is DDG and the like never got as good as Google in its golden age. They're just better than now in its shitty age. I sometimes really miss typing in the most vague query for a super niche subject and having the exact result i want without even scrolling. Those were the days.

For some reason the first result I get is joinfediverse.wiki then reddit, then the AI stuff but it seems to know what PieFed is, then two hosting providers who offer piefed images and the rest of the page is various docker containers.

Not really sure what you mean, OP. Every link seems to work okay:
https://www.google.com/search?q=piefed

E.g. top indexed link works for me over here: (but not you?)
https://joinfediverse.wiki/PieFed

That said, I love the concept of DDG, but sadly, it just doesn't return as robust a result as Google routinely does for me. 😕 I also used to use DogPile FWIW, which tapped a dozen+ search engines. Are they still around?

I've also heard some good things about SearX search, again FWIW...

im pretty fine with us being under the radar google and any other corpo wise. although unfortunately I don't think we are.

Are you me? That's my experience exactly.

I think it's my anti-scraper efforts that have made life very difficult for Google.

With the development of PieFed's anoobis feature scrapers are no longer a problem so I can look into opening the door to Google's crawler.

Google doesn't really operate any kind of social media, so I don't think so. My results from a incognito tab shows:

1. jointhefedierse.wiki

2. Reddit

3. Piefed.world

4. AI overview 🤢

5. Piefed Patreon

6. Piefed Codeberg

7. Blorp iOS app

8. Elena Rossini article about the threadiverse

etc.

And the first one only gives a 403.

Works fine for me

Is that the same reason why I can't connect to Piefed RSS links with most RSS readers?

Maybe, or maybe PieFed is doing RSS wrong. Which reader would you like me to test? Preferably a FOSS one so I can see how that reader is trying to interpret PieFed's output.

I tried with RSS Guard and Fluent Reader and didn't manage to make it work with them. Feeder seems to work though.

Thanks, I'll take them for a spin.

Thanks, I really appreciate it!

Me as well. I wonder if it only fails in some geolocations, or conversely if OP is using a VPN that some anti-AI scraper feature has blocked the IP range in.

You guys still use google ? 😂.

Use of VPN ? DNS setting ?

No problems here , last time i used google is almost 10 years ago

Correct

Not sure about that. Startpage gives me join.piefed.social as first result and I think they're forwarding to Google.

i remember when they even hid lemmy for a while.

Its been 4 years for me now, not going back

Just wanted to give you an update. I figured out the issue, it was on my end.

When I copy the link from a Piefed.social community, that's what I get:

https://piefed.zip/community/piefed_meta@piefed.social/feed

If I try from Lemmy, I get this:

https://piefed.social/feeds/c/piefed_meta.xml?sort=Hot

And I actually attempted that, but didn't work:

https://piefed.social/community/piefed_meta@piefed.social/feed

It turns out that the original link, from the original instance, is that simple, and actually works just fine:

https://piefed.social/community/piefed_meta/feed

So, just a little suggestion. I don't know if that's by design for some reason, but maybe when clicking on the 'RSS feed' button it should always (regardless the instance you're in) return the original, functional link: https://piefed.instance/community/community-name/feed

Regular Vodafone Internet. No VPN.

So weird. The only thing I know about networking is that the answer always turns out to be DNS (/s... I think? hrm, perhaps it really is the case? :-P)

Maybe someone else "near" you (in the IP sense) used a similar address that triggered blocking of the entire range that includes you.

Either way you could try playing around with a VPN, making sure to set it to a variety of different geolocations?

But the fact that it sometimes works - for many of us - while sometimes not working, for others, is definitely odd.

It's not really the point of my post. This site isn't officially related to PieFed and shouldn't be the first result of a search engine.

Fair, though Rimu already addressed that (his anti-AI scraping countermeasures likely caused that), so I was offering the additional fact that the site worked for me rather than generating a 403 error as it did for you, and a way to further test why that error came about.

The situation with Google should be a lot better now: