https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/almost-all-searches-on-my-independent-search-engine-are-now-from-seo-spam-bots/
He needs to channel the spirit of IncrediBill.
The thing is, I did a few searches on his search engine. Really common terms gave a hodge-podge of relevant and irrelevant results. Terms that I think of as medium tail (popular terms for smaller niches) gave no results at all.
I couldn't find any two-word query that gave relevant results. One of the results gave a raw (i.e. mostly unreadable) RSS feed.
The "newest pages" and "random page" features work and yield much better "results" than search. In other words, I saw that I was more likely to find an interesting result by clicking the random page link than by typing in a search query for a topic I'm currently interested in.
It sent me, for example, to Jamie Rubin's blog post
https://jamierubin.net/2022/05/15/daddy-do-you-have-a-dictionary/
which ultimately sent me to this script
https://github.com/jamietr1/google-docs-writing-tracker
I actually got sucked in and I'd say about 1/3 of the pages I saw were interesting on some level. The "random" and "newest" features are sort of like Stumbleupon without the spam, while the search engine is nothing like Google without the spam.
That might explain why he doesn't have a lot of human visitors.
I do feel for the guy. My little directory gets pounded every day by SEO bots wanting to know who I'm linking too. In fact they found me faster than Bing and Yandex when I first launched. The web is lousy with SEO bots.
Ditto for GBY bots, they want to know who I link to but send zero traffic (but I expected that.)