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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

I have exactly this problem. Beej's Guide to Network Programming is indexed just fine. Beej's Guide to C won't index.

The automated tool says it's in violation of some unnamed rule, but I can't figure out which. There's zero SEO, tracking, or ads, and the content is educational and G-rated.

All the other guides index just fine.

I asked for a review and they came back with the same ambiguous message. Eventually I just gave up.

Recently I split the C guide in two. I'll have to check to see if that made any difference.

But it left a bad taste, and now I don't trust Bing or DDG to provide complete results. Google's overrun with spam, but at least my stuff actually shows up on Startpage.

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It is interesting since Beej's guide is probably the most famous C/Unix programming tutorial after K&R.

Whats K&R?

Kernighan & Ritchie: https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernig...

http://cslabcms.nju.edu.cn/problem_solving/images/c/cc/The_C...

I don't know if I'd go _that_ far. There are a lot of great books out there.

But I'm pretty sure mine is the greatest that you can't pay money for. ;)

The statement isn't too far from the truth ngl. I think it'd probably be in the top 10 most famous C guides out there.

C? I don't know, I never heard of it. Network programming guide, on the other hand, is arguably the most famous out there.

Well, when you search for the C guide, for the love of God, don't use DDG. ;)

beej.us/guide is the first hit

Unfortunately beej.us/guide/bgc is not.

Could it be due to some overly zealous prude filter and the unfortunate coincidence that "beej" is American slang for blowjob (oral sex)?

Actually outright porn is indexed you know or so I hear.

Porn is one thing, the word Beej is quite another. I wish this was a joke.

Indexed, but only returned if the search query was explicitly and unambiguously about porn.

Not true, I've had pages of x-rated results with SafeSearch on, with DDG and Bing, a couple of times. The search only needs to be sufficiently weird.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334670

Where "weird" involves words like "licking" and "party" (not saying it's not a bug, just that it's a statistics vs actual language understanding bug in a feature and not absence of that feature). I bet there's no way to compose all of the words "spatula", "serotonin", "pion" and "deconstruction" along with words like is/a/an/of/how/what/when that would turn safe search off, despite any query of this format would pretty weird.

That's pretty obscure slang, I'm American and have never heard it.

It's very common.

Is it very common?

If I search "Beej" on Google without Safesearch enabled, I get 14.3M results, if I turn on the Safesearch filter, it still returns 14.3M results.

If I repeat the same experiment with "blowjob", it's 1.5B results vs 23M.

If I search for "Beej" on Bing with SafeSearch Off, I get 2,840,000 results, while with Safesearch on Strict, I get 2,800,000 results. I couldn't search for "blowjob" at all with Safesearch on Strict.

It's generally spoken, not typed out.

I used to say, "'Beej', like 'B.J. Hunnicutt' from MASH."

But MASH is getting a little too far removed these days. :)

Took me a while to figure it out, but yeah - seems "Beej" is pronounced as "(Bee)(j)", which matches the pronunciation of "BJ". But I don't think it's relevant to site indexing, unless search engines started to take homophones into account.

EDIT: but maybe they did, ever since voice assistants became a thing?

I've definitely considered that. (I'm well-aware of my nickname's connotations, and I just don't care. :) )

But they index everything else on my site and don't prude out over that...

Wow it's beej. I owe you rather a lot of beers, Guide to Network Programming is directly responsible for my entire career. Sorry for the low value post! :}

Entire career? That's pretty high praise... Well, if you're ever in Bend, OR drop me a DM and I'll start to collect. :)

My hero! Thank you for your work.

(Yes, not adding much insightful conversation. I don’t care if I get downvoted.)

It seems to show up for me. Perhaps it is fixed now.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=c+guide+stdalign&t=ffab&ia=web

brings up your guide as the 6th result.

I have to add "beej" to the search, and then it hits my C Library Reference Guide. But the C Tutorial Guide is nowhere to be found. :(

i assume you have >0 backlinks to the site?

> i assume you have >0 backlinks to the site?

I always wondered about this. What exactly is a backlink, and why should I need one?

Some other website linking to your website. The general premise is that if other sites with some known reputation are linking to you, you have a bit more credibility than a completely isolated site that nobody else references.

Backlinks are links to your website used by algorithms like PageRank^1 to weight how important your site is. Roughly speaking, more links, especially from sites with their own high pagerank = higher rank.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Some rando backlink checker says it's about 1300.

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