Developer discovers site-indexing tool was silently failing 90% of the time

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A developer building an iOS app acquisition tracker spent six weeks trying to reliably determine whether their site appeared in search engine indexes. The custom checker they built used a control query to validate results, but the tool's datacenter IP was being blocked by Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing — with Bing silently returning a completely different page while responding with HTTP 200. After finally receiving the first-ever 'INDEXED' verdict, a follow-up probe revealed the tool was immediately blocked eight consecutive times by DuckDuckGo's CAPTCHA system. The developer concluded the tool grants roughly one usable query per cold session before locking out the IP, meaning the single success had consumed the session's only valid measurement opportunity. The key lesson drawn was that validating a tool's correctness is not the same as validating its reliability — the control gate was logically sound but practically unavailable most of the time.

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