I used Google back in 2006 to look for content on when FGW shortened all their fleet of 158s from 3 coaches to 2 and the chaos that ensued on the Cardiff to Portsmouth line as a result and I’ve been here ever since.

 
Am a confirmed DuckDuckGo user now. Can't remember how/when I found the Coffee shop - perhaps Google was the only one then !

 
I found the Coffee Shop when using Google to look for details of the Reading Station rebuild.  I was then a lurker and later became a member.

 

I don't think I used Brave to find the Coffee Shop.  That was many moons ago and probably involved either Firefox or the old MS Internet Explorer

Coffee Shop is bookmarked on the Brave browser window, however.

 
No utter shocks in the early results - but some fascinating data which is helping inform me as to where all the access are coming from, which are effective in helping us, and which might be a waste of bandwidth / data harvesting for no discernable reason.   Much appreciated, keep comments coming.

 
I registered as a member of the Coffee Shop forum on 23 December 2007, at 00:12:25.  I remember doing so, as I had become increasingly frustrated at the constant delays I had experienced getting home from Bristol on the train, missing our child's early swimming lessons, for example.

However, I have no recollection at all as to how I found this particular forum on the internet to vent my frustrations.  You were all unlucky. 

My current search engine of choice is Google.

CfN. 

 

Interesting ...


My highlighting.   No - they are failing to say who they are - no must about that - it's their choice and as a content provider, perhaps it should be our right at the Coffee Shop to chose who indexes us. As written, this description of the Brave Search Crawler suggests they are intentionally muddying the waters to index us (and use our resources and bandwidth in doing to so) in a misleading way.

 
Using Brave these days

 

Same here.

Meanwhile, I use DuckDuckGo.

 
I can't remember how I initially found the Coffee Shop. (via Chrome ((edit))
After becoming a regular lurker, I signed up and bookmarket it.
When I joined Firstbus, I verbally told our manager I was a member, but with a few changes of depot, many changes of managers, guessing that was lost in the mists of time.
Always posted carefully, but honestly, where it involved bus items; trying not to bring First into disrepute.

Now retired, I still try to post about what I hear and see about Firstbus (still in contact with current working drivers).

 
Question - which search engines have YOU used which have directed you to the Coffee Shop?

Background - why I am asking

We have ten times the number of visitors to the Coffee Shop than we had a year ago. "Users Online" is telling us around 2,000 good requests in the last 15 minutes compared to around 200 good requests on a typical look last year. A very high proportion of the additional traffic is from search engine crawlers and other automata, and to a very great extent it's what I had anticiated as we moved from http to https.  But I need to monitor it and ask / tell / force irrellevant search engines to ignore or go light on our pages - for example, Baiduspider and ClaudeBot are discouraged - told not to index us and if they persist are given a quick forbidden response.

Over the 24 hours to 04:30 this morning, almost 300,000 requests were made of our Coffee Shop worker server to the Coffee Shop URLs. 50,000 of those were from Amazon AI to feed Alexa, 20,000 from Bingbot to feed Bing and 10,000 from Googlebot to feed Google.  Those are the best known; in total a dozen different robots have been indexing us with in excess of 500 page requests each.

Comments welcome on where you might expect to find the Coffee Shop but have not done so.