A new website goes up—and Yandex beats them all

  Authentically You, a life and career coaching business in Wellington, New Zealand, has just launched. We’ve had a hand in the design and website development (where it had to be Wordpress and easy to manage), and it’s also been our task to get it on to the search engines. I was very surprised that […]

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Twitter pushes the near future to look more bipolar than multipolar

Dave Troy’s analysis of the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter makes for interesting reading, since Troy has actually spoken to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and has a bit more of the inside track than most. For starters, Troy reminds us that Dorsey trusts Musk, in order to keep Twitter away from Wall Street investors. Dorsey […]

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Testing the seven search engines in the world

After reading Mojeek’s blog post from last July, I learned there are only seven search engines in the world now. In other words, I was checking more search engines out in the 1990s. It’s rather depressing, especially as the search market is largely a monopoly with Google dominating it (and all the ills that brings), […]

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Farewell, Sergei Mitrofanov

Farewell, my dear friend Sergei. Taken far too soon.   Sergei trying to corral us for a photograph in London in 2015.   I’m pretty upset by this so rather than write a fresh tribute (which I will have to do in time in an official capacity), I’m going to quote from what I wrote […]

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Putting the search engines through their paces

One more, and I might give the subject a rest. Here I test the search engines for the term Lucire. This paints quite a different picture. Lucire is an established site, dating from 1997, indexed by all major search engines from the start. The word did not exist online till the site began. It does […]

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Crunching the COVID-19 numbers for June 15

I hadn’t done one of these for a long time: take the number of COVID-19 cases and divide them by tests done. For most countries, the percentage is trending down, though there has been little movement in Sweden. I hadn’t included Brazil, Russia and India before, but as they are in the top part of […]

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Navigating the Julian Assange arrest

I find it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it either shows that our media wish to be complicit with Anglo-American interests, that they do little more than repeat […]

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How Silicon Valley and the Soviet Union are alike

Anton Troynikov’s banner on his Twitter account. I really enjoy Yakov Smirnoff’s old jokes about the Soviet Union, and the Russian reversal that is often associated with him. In the 21st century, I’ve used the odd one, such as, ‘In Russia, Olympics game you!’ and ‘In America, internet watch you!’. I’m sure I’ve done wittier […]

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Facebook overestimates and underestimates reach depending on the story it wants to tell

Funny, isn’t it? Last year, Facebook was busted for claiming that in some demographics, their ads could reach more people than there were people. When it comes to the US’s Russia probe, they claim their ads reached far, far fewer people: they initially claimed they reached 10 million, but Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia […]

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Of course Facebook knew about stolen accounts, even back in 2014: I told them

Official White House photo by Pete Souza In Wired today: ‘Russian trolls stole US identities to hide in plain sight’. This included hacking to steal Social Security details, then create social media presences using real identities.    I could have told you about the fake Facebook presences in 2014. Hang on, I did. There was […]

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