A rejected PSA for the de-Googling community on Reddit

Pity, this was just removed from the De-Google subreddit. Oh well, you try to do a public duty as a netizen … Here it is, as I’m not about to let it go to waste—I was hoping to share the love a bit more so legitimate websites had the full story. We all probably know […]

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Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?

It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]

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Read all about the SEO algorithm that I developed for Google

I figured out why people have been searching for my name with Google and SEO, all thanks to a backlink from someone who didn’t know any better. Ironically, they’re going to get their wish for a link from here, but for reasons they didn’t expect. Thanks to “AI” or LLMs, there is an entire virtual […]

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The curious case of Google’s SEO searchers

They may no longer be relevant, but most (all?) of our sites still have meta keyword tags. When we redevelop a site, we tend to take the header tags in full from the previous incarnation, so unlike the old joke about George Washington’s axe (‘This is the original. I’ve only had the handle and blade […]

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Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play

I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago.     In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]

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Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years

Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’.     Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified.     I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]

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Google search is worse by design—internal memo

You didn’t imagine it: Google’s search is worse, and that’s by design, according to a document produced in discovery.     Dr Jonny L. Saunders of UCLA shared one on their Mastodon earlier today. The internal Google email, from Jerry Dischler to Anil Sabharwal, dated May 3, 2019, expresses a concern over the company missing […]

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‘Google.com is blocked’—good riddance

This error message began creeping up this week:     google.com is blocked google.com refused to connect. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE   And appears with increasing frequency. Maybe Google is too poor to be able to serve everyone? I’ve noticed the search results worsen, as this blog’s covered. Is this the reason I can’t use it any more? […]

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Google News continues bias against independent media

This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]

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Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’

Rod Hilton, on how terrible Google is getting. This isn’t down to the web being worse, as Marissa Mayer laughably claims. This is down to Google focusing on its surveillance capitalism-based ad business, which earns most of its revenues, over search. It hasn’t been a search-centred company for decades.     And I thought its […]

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