It's my own personal hiking journal that I've made public so that other folks can document their own adventures too. It'll always be there as a way to explore something new or challenge myself - either to hike more miles, more vertical feet, adding new trails, or by building new features and working with contributors. There will always be new trails to explore, map, and write about over the course of my life. When I'm old and can't get out, it'll be nice to poke through the data, revisit the places I explored, and relive memories I had with friends, family, or loved ones while out exploring the woods.
I remember hiking under this bridge - it's a nice park but often this area was super crowded on nice days during warm weather. Lots of people with their dogs. In the years I lived in PGH I always thought about how it was just a matter of time before a bridge would collapse - there's an insane amount of bridges throughout the city and just by the looks of some of them, gravity was going to win sooner than later. It's amazing that no one was killed, glad it wasn't the middle of the Summer when Frick Park is full, it could have been a lot worse.
This reply is based on my own biased experience, but I run a small website to share public trail data and I've found that Google (in my opinion) artificially suppresses my site's results on really basic searches. Within Google's search console you can easily check if a page has been indexed. For example, I've published new trails/hikes in the past where Google's index claims it includes the page.. but when I search "myhikes <name of trail>", it sometimes doesn't show up - even after clicking through multiple pages! If I change my search to "site:myhikes.org <name of trail>" it'll show up... weird? I think so.
I understand how keywords can be confused by search engines and "myhikes" is fairly generic as many people might post a blog with the string "my hikes", etc. Now if I search a popular trail that Google likes to serve up regularly (i.e. "myhikes <name of popular-indexed-trail>") it comes up as 1st in the list.
Additionally, what pisses me off even more, is that I've searched for "myhikes <name of trail>" and have been served Google's own map / shitty trail tiles ranked as #1, then my site is ranked #2. Doesn't that last bit feel a bit anti-competitive? It does to me, but maybe I'm biased.
Thanks for the reply! It's actually up and running, but if the response says "forbidden" it's likely because I blanket-block a lot of non-US IPs, AWS IP ranges, etc. because of annoying crawlers. This is bad practice, but I do it for several reasons. I've turned off some blanket-blocking for now.
If you see this comment, would you mind sharing if you were making a request from a US-based IP, VPN, or outside the US? Just curious - it'll help me understand things a bit better.
You can be <anything>.org but it doesn't mean people will find your website, or use it, or tell other people to use it, or even trust it in the first place. Same goes for <anything>.com, <anything>.net, etc.
.org is a great way for low-income websites to stay on the internet. I run a tiny organization, so I use .org.
Find a problem you want to solve for yourself and then build a solution.
I created https://myhikes.org as my side project in 2015 because I hated the existing public trail platforms at the time - a lot of things have changed since then, but so has my skill set, data set, the way I write, the way I think about features, the way I weigh pros/cons of features and time.
Don't aim to solve the world's problems or make money with a side project, aim to make your own life easier or more enjoyable in some way. You never know what will come of it later if you continue using, building, and growing your idea.
Update: Since I cannot edit the main post anymore, I figured I'd leave an update here.
I was able to speak with REI's AdventureProject's / HikingProject's content team and explained my side of the situation and they explained the content was user-submitted. They spend a lot of time and money dedicated to publishing content to make sure that it's not outright copying anything else. From what I could see in my database, REI had never been on that trail on MyHikes in the past, so the similar-looking data they published may have come from the user who added the trail. That user may have read the content on MyHikes and regurgitated it in HikingProject. I can certainly appreciate all of that since I have to sift through and process user-submitted trail notes as well, but I'm a team of 1 at a much smaller scale.
Their content team said they would remove the offending text that I felt was too close in relation to what I had wrote, which is a really cool response. They also mentioned they believe trail information should be available in multiple places for the hiking community - which I 100% believe in and is why I started MyHikes in the first place.
To wrap it up, I did not go down this road to try and take their content down just to keep a better rank - I truly felt like they had some information that had been ripped off and they were totally willing to change it to accommodate my concerns.
I had the same idea about the fake irrelevant data while trying to fall asleep last night. It's a great idea, but I also don't want to send any unwitting hiker or backpacker down the wrong route or include weird info that doesn't make sense - especially if someone gets lost on the trail and they're trying to decipher my trail notes.
I have contacted REI and submitted takedown requests on Google and Bing as well, but I'm not holding my breath for much. I do include a copyright at the bottom of the page from the site's inception until the current year as well.
It's nice to see that other people support this and don't just see this as me complaining. I truly think the internet is broken, but I'll continue to help build this stupid beast. Thanks for the reply!
Cool! As for “fake” info, I mean something like “look for the pink rocks next to the waterfall”. Something innocuous but you can point to to prove origin of their content.
Also, I’m a big fan of “if you can’t best ‘em, join ‘em”. I’d try to work out a deal with them rather than just take down your content.
It's my own personal hiking journal that I've made public so that other folks can document their own adventures too. It'll always be there as a way to explore something new or challenge myself - either to hike more miles, more vertical feet, adding new trails, or by building new features and working with contributors. There will always be new trails to explore, map, and write about over the course of my life. When I'm old and can't get out, it'll be nice to poke through the data, revisit the places I explored, and relive memories I had with friends, family, or loved ones while out exploring the woods.