Why Home Hosting Matters Now: Watching Bots, SEO Signals, and Google's Enduring Grip

By Mike Levin

Understanding the Landscape: Home Hosting, SEO, and AI in a Google World

This article delves into the interconnected worlds of personal productivity, technical infrastructure, and digital strategy, viewed through the lens of a tech-savvy individual. The author uses writing as a tool to explore complex topics like setting up and managing a “home-hosted” website—running web services on personal hardware rather than relying solely on large cloud providers. This approach offers greater control, particularly for monitoring website traffic (including automated bots and crawlers) which has become increasingly important with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The discussion extends to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the practice of making web content more visible in search results, and how its dynamics are changing. It contrasts older methods with the current necessity of generating signals through content and social media. Furthermore, the text analyzes the current state of web search, dominated by Google despite challenges from new AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. It reflects on Google’s strategies, market power (like its control over browser address bars), and its AI capabilities (like Gemini Deep Research), ultimately framing the author’s own project priorities within this technological and market context.

Writing as a Productivity Multiplier

We use writing to boost our productivity.

We write a lot and we facilitate the informed and well considered transitions into other states of thinking and doing. In that way, writing is an exploratory “what next” exercise. Given the tiniest bit of motivation and inspiration, writing skills that have cultivated the capture, exploration and iteration of such ideas can fab the flame, letting a multi-front flow out onto the page.

The Critical Role of Home Hosting in the AI Era

Home-hosting is critical because I have to watch the bots and crawlers now more up close and personal in the age of AI now more than ever before. A process similar to this is what launched my HitTail product from 2005. It’s a full 20 years later, and the very same issues are churning around. There’s a lot of value in watching your web log files — different from back then, because secure protocol has mostly cut off keyword data. But valuable for what and who is crawling, and what their behavior looks like. I need to watch it like a fish tank.

The Evolution of Content Discovery: From “Write It and They Will Come” to Signal-Based Promotion

That’s one of the multi fronts. But the pots won’t come if I don’t have some search traffic. If you write it, they will come. That was the old logic before everything got hyper-competitive and advertising based. Now, if you write it, you have some prayer that something will come visiting, but you still have to leave that breadcrumb trail. You still have to emit signals that you are here in the first place. And once they visit, they ought to be more signals that they found something special and ought to check again. And then hopefully hear you create some sort of feedback loop where visits create more visits. This is a mix of classic SEO and social media. As much as I enjoyed the “if you write it, they will come” days, social media is a necessary ingredient. It is those signals that you are here. It is those beacons that provide a path to your content. And while home hosting is one front, the actual content hosted there and how it is promoted is another front.

The Third Front: Cloud Independence Through Local AI Applications

And yet a third front is the details of the content itself and the projects it is tied to. This is the AI programming stuff. This is the Pipulate free and open source SEO software. This is the incorporation of LLM into a web framework that runs apps like they are installed Electron apps (like Slack, Zoom, Discord, VSCode) on your local machine. It’s a contrarian message. It is a path less traveled. It is an anti-pattern. But it is incredibly freeing and enabling for the webmaster who wants to do everything single-handedly and understand it at least from a control standpoint down to core. It’s a path to cloud independence. You’re never fully free from Microsoft in Google, but you can in great parts cut the cord.

Understanding the Three Distinct Fronts

So you might say that the three fronts of the idea I’m trying to capture our home hosting, the actual content being hosted, in the projects being described by the hosted content. Sure, there is overlap. But these are three distinct things. People talking about home hosting are not necessarily home hosting. There is the content that discusses it. And there is the fact that an actual network exists hosting the content that is discussing it. Sure, it gets a bit meta. And the third thing is that there are systems and projects and software and apps running in the background that somehow interact with and facilitate both the home hosting and the content being hosted, yet are a distinct third category because each is their own thing. Networks are networks. Content is content. Apps are apps.

Creating a Positive Feedback Loop Through Self-Hosting

These three things work together to create a positive feedback loop that compel me forward in certain directions. I write about a thing. That writing becomes hosted content. I see the result of that hosted content as web crawlers and bot-visits coming in through web logs, Google search console and other mechanisms. I will probably start running my own commenting system once I am home hosted, providing another feedback mechanism. Maybe I’ll add email subscriptions in the likes, cutting all cloud service dependencies which is one of those things you can do in a home hosting situation. You hardly have to rely on anyone for anything, except the exposure mechanism is getting you visitation in the first place. In other words, Google search.

Google’s Browser Address Bar Dominance

No, it is still only a Google first game because of all those deals that have the web browser address bar is locked up. In other words, all attempts to search the web, or otherwise navigate it start with typing something into the address bar. Then initiate a Google search. When is the last time that you actually typed “h t t p s” colon slash slash “w w w” dot something? No, everything you type in actually initiates a search and Google controls that search. That is the reason Google is dominant. That is what they pay Apple $20 billion a year for the rights in Safari. That is why the federal antitrust case is considering breaking off Chrome as the remedy. They who control the address bar, control search.

Google’s Response to AI Search Competition

And so, with all this AI assisted stuff happening, the Perplexity, the ChatGPT now with search built-in — they are all threats to Google. But all Google has to do is “good enough” respond. And they are doing that first with AI overviews, and now with the “Ask AI” mode, which is in a Google Labs experiment and becoming more and more prevalent. Google doesn’t really have to out innovate perplexity or ChatGPT so much as just be good enough while maintaining control of the browser address bar. This is the world we are preparing for. They continued Google dominance because of the network-effect lock-in, plus the occasional fringe player that only serves to teach Google what they need to throw resources into replicating.

Google’s Replication Strategy: From Office Suites to AI

And Google is good at replicating. They replicated the entire Microsoft office, productivity suite, even though they mostly bought the individual components like Writely that became Google Docs, and knit them together into the Google Suite whose collaborative features enabled by Google Chrome and who’s free price tier turned it into a existential threat too the untouchable Microsoft Office. This is the giant obvious example, but examples are everywhere. If it is replicable either by building or buying, Google can replicate it. And in the field of AI, they didn’t really need to replicate. They wrote the book on it, but we’re just keeping it held back in their LaMDA labs. They got the chat bots like ChatGPT first. They just held them back and allowed open AI to eat their lunch.

Google’s Gemini Deep Research: The Lightning Bruiser of AI Search

Google came out with Bard and got mud in their face because of how hallucinating and over-woke it was (miss-attributing science breakthroughs, founding, father ethnicity, etc), but this is being quickly addressed by facilitating Bard with a Gemini rebranding and layering in all the rest of the massive Google infrastructure in the form of Deep Research. Coupling Google’s effective copy of the Internet from their crawl-and-index process with a AI to perform research is a sweet spot. It is the lightning bruiser of research. When you watch ChatGPT’s equivalent, it’s like watching the little engine that could. Google will take 100 sites into account in about the time. ChatGPT will turn through three or four in their research. Deep research is impressive and I think we have hardly seen the beginning of its ramifications. If this were a video game, Google’s character is the lightning bruiser trope. Fast and strong. For a balanced game, your character either gets lightning speed or brute strength. Both in one is unbalanced and unfair gameplay. That’s Google right now — though it’s hard for the public at large to discern that.

Planning Weekend Projects: Home Hosting and SEO Recovery

You can see how this writing, journal style as it is, is probing out and exploring on different fronts. I am effectively planning my day. But what’s more, I am planning my focused weekend at work where I can get enormous chunks of things done that I will be distracted from during the proper work week. There are a number of projects competing for that slot this weekend:

• The home hosting webserver
  • The Networking parts (already done!)
  • Repurposing some hardware as a webserver / NixOS install
  • Working out the Jekyll GitHub Pages-like git release system
  • The dynamic DNS trick
• Recovering my tanked SEO traffic on the site I plan to host (this)
  • This is looking increasingly like the tagging & categorization project
  • Potentially rolling the Table of Contents work back in
  • Re-introducing other good template work that I rolled back
  • Web crawler / sitemap visualization

Prioritizing Pipulate: The Secret Weapon

But all that is really nothing compared to finishing out the Pipulate workflow which is so close to being finished.

Conclusion: Navigating a Google-Dominated World

So that’s it. This journal entry is a little exploration of the state of the world, where I come to the conclusion that we are still in a Google-dominated world when it comes to search. Some bleeding edge types might be kicking the Perplexity tires or going to ChatGPT every time they deliberately want to search. But the rest of the time you’re not really deliberately searching but rather navigating the Web using the browser address bar, inadvertently searching and still using Google anyway. And Google is responding to the AI threat in ways few people see, which is only really evident in how their Gemini Deep Research product performs. And so I gauge most of my moving forward around this.

And as far as my immediate work is concerned, even though I have two very interesting projects that I’d love to dive into this weekend, Pipulate and client-work at my day-job by extension takes priority. It’s the secret weapon right now. Everything else, while interesting and absolutely necessary to get my finger on the pulse of bot activity, is just not important and urgent. Important, but not urgent. Finishing out the Piulate work is important and urgent.

AI Analysis

• Title/Headline Ideas & Filenames:

  • Title: Navigating the Three Fronts: Home Hosting, Content Strategy, and Project Focus in the AI Era Filename: navigating-three-fronts-home-hosting-content-ai-era.md
  • Title: Why Home Hosting Matters Now: Watching Bots, SEO Signals, and Google’s Enduring Grip Filename: home-hosting-bots-seo-signals-google-dominance.md
  • Title: Google, AI Search, and Me: Prioritizing Pipulate Amidst a Shifting Tech Landscape Filename: google-ai-search-pipulate-prioritization-tech-landscape.md
  • Title: Journal Entry: Wrestling with Cloud Independence, SEO Realities, and Weekend Project Choices Filename: journal-cloud-independence-seo-realities-project-choices.md
  • Title: The Lightning Bruiser: Analyzing Google’s AI Response and Its Impact on My Workflow Filename: google-ai-response-lightning-bruiser-workflow-impact.md
• Strengths:
  • Authenticity: Provides a genuine, unfiltered look into the author’s thought process, connecting personal productivity with technical and strategic considerations.
  • Interconnectedness: Effectively demonstrates how seemingly disparate areas (hosting, content, SEO, AI, specific software projects) influence each other in a real-world context.
  • Timeliness: Engages with highly current topics like the impact of AI on search, Google’s market position, and the value of controlling one’s own infrastructure.
  • Strategic Reflection: Shows the value of reflective writing (“exploratory ‘what next’ exercise”) for clarifying priorities and understanding complex situations.
• Weaknesses:
  • Assumed Knowledge: Relies heavily on the reader understanding terms like Pipulate, NixOS, Jekyll, LLMs, and specific SEO concepts without much definition.
  • Lack of Structure (as expected): The journal format leads to a meandering flow that jumps between personal reflection, technical details, market analysis, and project planning.
  • Inward Focus: Primarily centers on the author’s specific situation, potentially limiting broader applicability without further context or generalization.
  • Actionability Gap: While concluding with a priority (Pipulate), it lacks detailed steps or ‘how-to’ information for the various technical tasks mentioned (e.g., setting up the home server).

• AI Opinion:

  This text offers valuable insight into the complex decision-making process of an individual operating at the intersection of web development, SEO, and AI strategy. Its strength lies in its authentic portrayal of how these fields connect and influence practical choices, like project prioritization and infrastructure decisions (home hosting). While its journal-like format and technical jargon limit clarity for a general audience, it serves as an effective personal log and planning tool. For peers facing similar challenges or those interested in the specific technologies and market dynamics discussed (Google’s dominance, AI search impact, Pipulate), the article provides a useful, albeit unpolished, perspective and snapshot of current considerations.