I do consistently get your VS Code addon in the first page of search results, though.
When I open up your website I don't really see much. A brand name and some download links are all I can find. I'm not sure if there's much for search engines to find, really.
Your homepage also massively lags my browser for some reason, that can't help in terms of search rankings. It's also continuously downloading megabytes of data for some reason. You should try out your website on a cheap Android phone, your target audience may generally not use those but search engines definitely optimize for them.
> Now, is it really because we compete with Github? Honestly, probably not, but controversy drums up interest and we need interest so that someone out there on the Internet can tell us what we're doing wrong.
Mission succeeded, I suppose. You've got another popular link to your website through HN and you're getting free SEO advice on top. Sadly, you won't be able to get Bing support through here, HN tech support posts mostly attract Google and Stripe employees.
Looks like it did although I really wish we didn't reward these type of brazen stunts to get attention. Outrage-baiting is still very effective I guess.
And at the end of the day, we got a lot of great SEO tips here. Thanks HN!
StartPage is Google and DDG is Bing, more or less.
https://www.codeium.com/robots.txt
Update: I also see that you serve your site off GitHub... so that might be part of it as well? Bing might not index those sites?
# Allowing all web crawlers access to all content
User-agent: *
Disallow:
At least you'll be able to look in your logs and see if BingBot is grabbing the file or not.
If you turn of JS there's almost no actual text on the site; only the FAQ has any serious amount of text. This probably doesn't help. Having the page open also really slows down my laptop and constantly uses ~50%-75% CPU and ~130M memory. No idea if that's a factor, but it takes quite a lot of computing resources to actually make the homepage render any text and perhaps Bing doesn't deal well with that (and even then, it's not all that much text).
Admittedly I have a somewhat slow laptop, but I can't recall the last time merely opening a webpage slowed down my machine this much, and this includes webapps, so it's really an outlier.
Either way, Microsoft specifically blocking it is the least likely explanation by far.
> Having the page open also really slows down my laptop and constantly uses ~50%-75% CPU
OK here, for contrast: https://i.imgur.com/Qb2ux3o.png
> it takes quite a lot of computing resources to actually make the homepage render any text
On my own laptop, I see text in 100-200ms. A 3G connection on a simulated cheap mobile in Sao Paolo gets 2.3s: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/230209_AiDc5N_FKY/
These are both fine times: even a cheap device on a bad connection can get text rendering quickly. It's not a very taxing JS payload.
Yes, I know; but there are limits on this, otherwise people would be mining Bitcoin via search indexers and whatnot. Like I said: I don't know if this is a factor here, but it might be. It's something that should probably be addressed either way.
The initial render time is fine. It just constantly uses CPU, according to htop and the Firefox process viewer, and it noticeably slows down everything.
The main problem with relying on js rendering is that it happened much much later than the crawl. Days at least and sometimes weeks. For us, fresh content was key, so js rendering was not possible.
This is a case where I'm not ready to attribute to malice what is very likely incompetence.
Title:
We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website
Now, is it really because we compete with Github? Honestly, probably not, but controversy drums up interest and we need interest so that someone out there on the Internet can tell us what we're doing wrong. [...] we only care about getting as many software engineers to experience the power of generative AI for software development via our free product.Competing doesn't mean top of field. It might just mean making enough to eek out a living.
So the ends justifies the means?
It's pretty slimy to imply in the clickbait title that you're being blocked due to competing with MS, when you know well that it's not the reason. Admitting it's clickbait in the last paragraph doesn't make it any better.
The HN title should really be edited to remove the "We compete with GitHub" part.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
Now, there is no shame in not having the top product in your niche. Everyone needs to start somewhere! But for somebody at Bing to risk going against their stated policies and blocklist a competitor, they at a bare minimum need to be somebody MS would consider a competitor. Clearly not the case here.
As a tl;dr there is very little reason to pay for Tabnine. Copilot is far superior in the realm of paid products, and Codeium is comparable to Copilot.
What exactly is the business model though? It's always a red flag when "privacy respecting" and "free" are bundled together. I definitely _want_ to pay something for that type of service.
At the time, there was no "Safety Report" to indicate why Bing thought it was dangerous. The report page linked to https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bing-site-safety?url=https%3a%2... and it said "That web page doesn't exist"
To fix it, we had to register with "Bing Webmaster Tools" (https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about) and raise a support ticket.
Within a few days, the issue "resolved itself". It's possible that raising a ticket forced some automatic refresh of the indexed data for the domain.
1) Does "indexation" mean what whoever wrote this thinks it means? :P
2) Why not document what the issues actually are on that page, so that the website owner doesn't have to guess?
To be fair, why a website doesn't crawl/index isn't always obvious from a search engine's end.
https://daverupert.com/2023/02/solved-the-case-of-the-bing-b...
That makes sense. I never heard of "Codeium" before. Perhaps "Codeium programing" can give a better result for a programing tool. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Codeium+programing
[Edit: fixed name and bing link]
https://i.imgur.com/yfmXHSa.png
I almost never use Bing, and am pretty sure I’ve never even opened Bing on my phone at all before. Settings show that “Safe search” was at “Moderate”, presumably the default.
https://i.imgur.com/1QB5PUI.png
On an unrelated note, Bing uses purple as the default color for all links? That’s confusing to me. Purple to me on the web used to mean previously visited. The only board on 4chan I visit these days is /g/ and only very rarely as well. Scrolling the Bing results, all results have purple color.
You can go through the procedure of registering with their webmaster tools equivalent, submit a ticket and wait.
Or you can simply just wait.
In my limited experience (6 sites) the result was the same. Eventually it will resolve itself and you'll be back in the index, albeit with some very weird links showing up (an effect of the original attack). This does, at least, alert you to some vulnerabilities you may have previously been unaware of.
When searching bing with: codeium coding
That search will bring this product up in the first position. It's a shame that the specific "indexation" issues aren't shown, but did the author read the linked bing page to see the list of possible issues?
Additionally you have no robots.txt file, and your homepage has no self referencing canonical. TL;DR you don't show up in the index because you are not yet notable. Do some digital marketing.
It was an intersection of multiple stupid things, not maliciousness.
It is happy to show its github repo and a bunch of blogspam about it though.
It is even happy to link you to bun.sh/install, which immediately downloads a shell script to your computer upon clicking. Bizarre.
There's no way of really knowing. Bing is a black box with no transparency, like most search engines.
One thing though: `Codeium` seems like a generic and vague word. Also I won't remember how to spell it because of the weird `e` before the `i`. I can see why Bing has trouble even recognizing the word. It's optimizing for the correct spelling. Try a rebrand, something catchy, and not something that has a hundred other words that sound like it.
Normally HN and Reddit are less moderated than other sites that do a lot of shadow banning, condolences for getting stomped on by large co's and also welcome to the internet
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I just don't know what you're talking about."
Another example I recently ran into: Windows Ameliorated (a set of scripts for heavily trimming Windows 10), famously featured on Linus Tech Tips. Search Google for it, you get the website link as first result. Search Bing... you'll never find the website for it. You will find the archive.org ISO Download link, but https://ameliorated.info will never be returned.
