What would happen if I blocked big search?

May 16, 2025

The major search engines are showing slop summaries first and websites second. They link to sites sometimes, but they’d much prefer searchers stay on the results page and ask followup questions. Engagement numbers and all that.

These companies run mass content scraping campaigns to train their own slop models and provide servers to other slop companies in the same data centers their crawlers operate from. Every word I’ve thrown into this illustrious publication—the reading of which a total of five people have, at various times, expressed mild enjoyment—has been both silently and explicitly declared fair game by the slop companies. The only positive thing I can egotistically hope to grasp about this development is that a distant and diluted abstraction of my words and thoughts could be subtly influencing the thoughts and decisions of people around the world—the same way a pinch of salt would affect the flavor profile of a large vat at the soup factory, or like the breeze under the wings of chaos theory’s cute and frighteningly powerful butterfly mascot.

Which leads me to ponder the potential effects of adding firewall rules to block the autonomous system numbers of all the large and extremely rich companies who see fit to tell me to “opt out” of their ceaseless content gobbling via a method which has mysteriously stopped working at convenient times and does nothing if the gobbling has already occurred.

These are the companies whose ASNs I’m thinking of blocking:

• Google (Search and GCP)
• Microsoft (Bing and Azure)
• AWS
• Oracle

I’d love to throw IONOS and Hetzner on there too, but people like to host feed aggregators and proxies with them so I’ll leave it for now.

My site would get delisted from all the major search engines. But with the results overwhelmed by bad actors for years and the search engines themselves actively discouraging clicks, how beneficial is it to climb the ranks now?

Let’s think about the good and bad stuff a major ASN block would bring.

Good stuff:

• I get to feel smug about sticking it to the slop companies. This is my ship, I’m the captain, and I’m also the entire crew, but y’all ain’t welcome ‘round these parts
• Less of my stuff ends up in a slurry devoid of all meaning
• Less spam email
• Less email from people who didn’t read past the title of a post about an issue I solved
• The wannabe hipster in me would be proud

Bad stuff:

• No more emails from other people experiencing the same bizarre technical problems that I am a magnet for
• Even fewer people would be helped by posts I wrote
• All consumers of the compute and networking these companies provide would be blocked, including resellers and hobbyists and who knows what else
• The slop companies would still have all the content they’ve gobbled up to this point
• While blocking the big ASNs would impede the biggest crawlers, some use proxies through VPS providers and even residential IPs
• Clones of my site would not get penalized in search rankings, though that’s always been iffy
• Link previews on big social media would have titles replaced with “Access Denied”
• The wannabe hipster in me would be proud

What’s neat and really cool nowadays is that even with how useless search is, blog discovery isn’t an issue. I’m constantly finding interesting new blogs on all the directories we have now, like little internet phone books. And people have their own little internet phone books in the form of blogrolls, and then on top of that they’re linking to posts and saying LOOK AT THIS and before I know it I’m fifteen blogs deep. I wander from blog to blog like I used to wander from tree to tree in the tiny patch of woods I grew up in. I ask the same questions as I did then: how long has this been here? who left these marks? where else are they pointing to? why do they think the prequels were bad? is Vader really my father?

I search for answers knowing I will never find them. I certainly won’t on Google and Bing.

I’m not certain about blocking the offenders on the list yet. I feel like I’m missing something major from the bad stuff list and I’m not sure what it is—which I also view as an indicator that I should do it and see what breaks. If I’m honest the status quo isn’t meaningfully affecting me, and going to the trouble of blocking those ASNs is full of unknowns. Sounds like an interesting experiment though.