More of Bing’s follies (they just keep coming)

I see WorldWideWebSize.com has wised up and figured out Bing was having them on about the number of results it had for their search terms.     When Bing says it has 300-odd results for the site:lucire.com yet doesn’t actually go beyond a limit of around 50 (where it has been stuck for many months), […]

Read More… from More of Bing’s follies (they just keep coming)



IndexNow is a crock

  Just trying to clear a few things off my hard drive. Here was one that was particularly curious when I was investigating what was going on with Bing: the files submitted by Cloudflare’s IndexNow. The theory: it would send Bing the newest accessed pages to add to the index. The reality: these are not […]

Read More… from IndexNow is a crock



Mystery sitemap files in Bing

I only signed up to Bing Webmaster Tools when investigating why the company site did so poorly in Bing and Duck Duck Go—we now know it was nothing to do with us, and everything to do with a search engine basically disintegrating before our very eyes. This, too, was interesting, from a screenshot dated July […]

Read More… from Mystery sitemap files in Bing



Updating old pages since the experts are wrong

With all the odd results coming up in site searches—it’s not restricted to Bing—I attended to some of the older pages on our websites. Curiously, in a site:lucire.com search, even Google has our 2005 competition page up high, namely in fifth. There is only one link from our site internally to this page. I know […]

Read More… from Updating old pages since the experts are wrong





What search engines show in their top 10 isn’t always relevant

The Bing collapse did lead me to look at some of the ancient pages on the Lucire site that the search engines were still very fond of. For instance, the ‘About’ page was still appearing up top, which is bizarre since we haven’t made any links to it for years—it reflected our history in 2004. […]

Read More… from What search engines show in their top 10 isn’t always relevant



Attempting re-entry into Bing’s Pubhub

In early July, I wanted to see if we could add Lucire to Bing as a news source in their Pubhub—after all, Google has us as one, as Yahoo, Altavista and Excite had back in the day. And I’d say that 25 years of publishing with an international team might qualify us as being media. […]

Read More… from Attempting re-entry into Bing’s Pubhub



Rising popularity on Autocade

Ever since we had to reset the counter for Autocade in March, because of a new server and a new version of Mediawiki, it’s been interesting to see which pages are most popular. The old ranking took into account everything from March 2008 to March 2022. With everything set to zero again, I can now […]

Read More… from Rising popularity on Autocade



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 […]

Read More… from Farewell, Sergei Mitrofanov



Laying out French articles in HTML takes a long time

Above: Some French text in Lucire.   Regular Lucire readers will have seen a number of articles run in English and French (and one in Japanese) on our main website. Typographically, the French ones are tricky, since we have to distinguish between non-breaking spaces and non-breaking thin spaces, and as far as I know, there […]

Read More… from Laying out French articles in HTML takes a long time