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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Archive for February 2023
27.02.2023
Of course some of us expected Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to be rubbish—and we knew ChatGPT would make stuff up. Because Bing makes stuff up.
If you have a normal, functioning web crawler (or spider), there’s no way you would ever wind up with pages that have never existed. Nothing about this is normal.
The latest contributions from Microsoft’s Wayback Machine for site:lucire.com are these. On my phone, I noticed it had ranked in third place, after two framesets from the early 2000s, a page we had for Plucker for the Palm Pilot! That gives you an idea of how old Bing’s index must be.
On the desktop, meanwhile, a site:lucire.com search now includes sites that aren’t lucire.com. I guess if your index is that small now, you need to pad it out not just with repetition, but other domains. One is related to us—it’s our Dailymotion channel—but the other is totally random with no connection whatsoever. Bit like ChatGPT.
My friend Robin Capper has discovered the same, when enquiring with the new Bing about himself. It claimed to have sourced from his Linkedin—but fed him back facts that are nowhere to be found. Here’s his blog post. I like how he put artificial intelligence in quotes, since there’s nothing intelligent about this. It’s a simple text processor, but it sure gets a lot of things wrong.
Tags: 2000s, 2023, AI, Bing, blogosphere, bugs, Microsoft, retro, search engine, technology
Posted in business, internet, New Zealand, technology, typography, USA | No Comments »
27.02.2023
I needed a 2023 wall planner today, but none of the downloadable ones really suited—so I made my own. Rather than keep it to myself, I thought I’d offer it as a free download, in case anyone else wants it. They’re two A4s, six months on each, but as the file’s a PDF, you can scale it to A3 without any loss in quality.
The PDF is here (89,747 bytes)—help yourself. And yes, I know it’s nearly March.
When I was around five going on six, I found great joy making little calendars. The Massimo Vignelli Stendig calendar was still very influential in the mid- to late 1970s, and many designers followed that lead. They fascinated me, and I got used to the patterns (how April and July start on the same weekday, as do September and December; in non-leap years, so do February and March, and January and October). I remember drawing (on A4s) calendars out from 1978 to 1980 to study these patterns. Of course, 1980 was a leap year, which threw up different patterns.
Ever the perfectionist, there was one month where I missed some days. Upon realizing my mistake, I became frustrated, and stopped. If I had Twink or Liquid Paper I might not have stopped!
When I had to design some calendars for work in the 2010s, the Stendig calendar still came to mind, but certain practical considerations meant I couldn’t ape it completely. Still, there was plenty of big Helvetica on it.
Tags: 1970s, 1978, 2023, calendar, childhood, design, graphic design, Helvetica, Massimo Vignelli, memory, modernism, office, typography
Posted in business, design, typography, USA | No Comments »
21.02.2023
Two great pieces by Cory Doctorow came my way today on Mastodon.
The first is an incredibly well argued piece about why people leave social networks. Facebook and Twitter won’t be immune, just as MySpace and Bebo weren’t.
One highlight:
As people and businesses started to switch away from the social media giants, inverse network effects set in: the people you stayed on MySpace to hang out with were gone, and without them, all the abuses MySpace was heaping on you were no longer worth it, and you left, too. Once you were gone, that was a reason for someone else to leave. The same forces that drove rapid growth drove rapid collapse.
The second is about all the hype surrounding chatbots, and Google and Bing. Cory begins:
The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar—even more remarkable is that Google agrees.
Microsoft has nothing to lose. It’s spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?
He goes on, analysing how Google is not really an innovator, and most things it has have come to it through acquisition. They wouldn’t know a clever innovation if they saw it.
And:
ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season’s web3 and cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps.
I had better not quote any more as it’s way more important you visit both these pieces and see the entire arguments. Farewell to Big Social then.
Though if Cory is right, and my own thoughts have come close, then is there any point to web searching if these chatbots are going to unleash machine-authored crap, complementing some of the already godawful spun sites out there? Search engines should be finding ways of weeding out spun and AI-authored junk, rather than being in league with them—because that could mean the death of the web.
Or maybe just the death of Google and Bing, because Mojeek might be there to save us all.
Tags: 2023, AI, Bing, Cory Doctorow, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, search engines, social media, social networking, Twitter
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
11.02.2023
This may be wise, or it may not be. I thought netizens would want to know if a page was ancient, and since Google keeps putting really old stuff that hasn’t been linked for nearly 20 years into the top 10 for a site:lucire.com search, I may as well let readers know what they’re going to click on by telling them in the meta descriptions of some of our 2000–5 pages.
I guess Bing led the way, showing that you should turn search engines into Wayback Machines, and Google has recently followed suit, putting these old framesets and pages up instead of the current indices that it used to show. Who knows what’s going on with these folks? Maybe they love nostalgia?
I know I’ve complained, too, when search engines offer up novelty over relevance, but here these pages aren’t even that relevant. Certainly not the ones you’d expect to see in the top 10 if search engines spidered like they used to (and Mojeek and Brave clearly still do).
Tags: 2000s, 2023, Google, search engine, technology, USA
Posted in internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
08.02.2023
I could just repeat my post from January 26. Let’s face it, Google is a notorious spammer, with a failing search engine, and an advertising business that’s a decent negligence lawsuit away from collapsing.
It was 2011 when I showed everyone that your opt-out settings in Google Ads Preferences Manager were meaningless. Today, your email preferences are meaningless, since of course this incompetent Big Tech firm spammed me again. There must be some pretty hopeless technology behind all of this. You have to wonder when a company can’t get the fundamentals right.
No wonder so many spammers choose Gmail.
Of course, Microsoft is pretty hopeless at the best of times. Today I tried to access my desktop PC’s hard drive across the network from my laptop, only to be asked again that I feed in a username and password. Except neither exists when I’m doing local stuff. I couldn’t remember how I got around it last time, but today it was buried here:
Of course this stuff changes every time, and Windows seems to change your settings without you knowing.
I wouldn’t have needed to do this file transfer if Apples worked. Last time I tried to get cellphone images on to an Imac, it was a pretty simple procedure (make sure they are both on Bluetooth and let them chat). These days it insists you upload everything on to Icloud and get it down off Icloud. Even when the Iphone and Imac are connected via USB.
I’m sure there’s a way around this, but I really couldn’t be bothered finding it. It proved quicker to plug in the Iphone to a Windows computer. Shame that my problems weren’t over after I did this, since all computer companies like to make things difficult for users.
Tags: 2023, Apple, cellphone, email, Google, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, software, spam
Posted in internet, technology | No Comments »
07.02.2023
After years of using the web, I think I know a little about how web spidering works. The web spider hits your home page (provided it knows about it), then proceeds to follow the links on it. Precedence is given to the pages within your site that are linked most, or are top-level: in Lucire’s case, that would be the home page, and the HTML pages that come off it (the indices for fashion, beauty, travel, and lifestyle, among others). Weighting would be given to those linked more: with so many fashion stories on the site linking back to the fashion index, the one we’ve used since the mid-2000s, then the fashion index would rank highly. This, I thought, was conventional.
With Bing becoming Microsoft’s Wayback Machine and generally failing to pick up anything after 2009, there must be something else going on in search engine-land. After reporting on Google’s failures in January, I see little has improved. I was even able to do a Google search where 10 per cent of the top 50 results were repeated—which beats Bing’s 40 per cent—though I wasn’t able to replicate that for this post. But the issue is that this shouldn’t be happening at all.
Here were Google’s top 10 yesterday for site:lucire.com, with my remarks next to the entries. Like Bing, there’s a page on there that’s never been referred to; if it ever were linked, it would have been accidental (it’s the subdirectory for 2002 articles; we used to put an index.html redirect in those directories in case the pages were accidentally hit due to manual coding). The number of times lucire.com/2002 would have been referenced would be fewer than ten, maybe even fewer than five. But there it is, in third.
There are three framesets from 20 years ago that have made it into the top 10. There is Devin Colvin’s entertainment page from 2004–5 that also has not been linked to in 17-plus years—except by Bing and now, Google decides to make it top-10 prominent.
I’ve no feelings either way for a 2011 and a 2022 article to appear in the top 10, though it’s very, very strange that the top-level pages—pages that are linked throughout the site from articles dating from 2005 and later—don’t appear. They used to in Google.
Google cannot hide behind the excuse that its service has worsened because the web’s content has worsened (a phenomenon, I might add, they created). Here is an existing site, one that has always been in their index (since Lucire pre-dates Google) and it’s doing a terrible job of indexing it and ranking the pages.
Brave, with its few pages, gets it right on a search just for Lucire (we can’t do site: there as that’s powered by Bing). It gives us the print ordering page, the beauty index, the news page, and the travel index (‘Volante’). Mojeek requires a search word so obviously that sways things, but even then it manages to come up with the current home page, ‘Volante’ index, and Lucire TV, which are acceptable. At least they’re current, and currently linked. Today, Bing has fallen to five results for site:lucire.com, its lowest ever, and four of those pages are framesets from 2002.
In fact, it might be time to see how it’s gone for our sample set.
Not great for us. There are some anomalies there, chiefly Google’s estimates of what it has for The Rake, and it seems Lucire’s on our way out of Bing altogether. Mojeek continues to be the most steady, stable and sensible of these three search engines.
If you’re relying on Google or Bing, you really need to think twice. Something has been wrong with Bing for some time, and it’s catching in Mountain View.
Tags: 2023, Bing, Google, Lucire, media, Microsoft, Mojeek, publishing, search engines, technology
Posted in internet, media, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
02.02.2023
When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not?
Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out.
The trouble is those ads made so little money it took ages to reach the threshold.
Last year, when looking at the revenue figures, I was surprised things had reset and we had only earned a few dollars. Where did the US$100 go? There was no record of a payout.
I began enquiring and it took them a while to respond. They said they would pay (what would have happened if I never asked?) but what hit our account was NZ$100.
In other words, 35 per cent short.
I guess they’re counting on people not chasing up NZ$35, and I’m wondering if it’s a worthwhile use of my time. Or maybe it’s better I write this blog post to warn others about Disqus.
Disqus either short-paid us by 35 per cent or they have no clue how currencies work. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on their company.
Unsurprisingly, I began taking Disqus off our sites, which was what I had always planned to do once we got to US$100. Off it went from Lucire for starters, though on Autocade it had been quite useful. I had signed up early enough to have the no-ads option, so I left it, especially as we had great commenters like Graham Clayton from Australia, who has a wealth of knowledge about cars himself.
This week, we noticed the no-ads option had disappeared and the bottom of Autocade’s pages had turned into an ugly mess, at least on the desktop version. We already had our own ad in the footer, so we didn’t need multiple ones cheapening the site.
Not only did Disqus pay us short by 35 per cent last year, I discovered their ads don’t even pay. Yes, Disqus was included in our ads.txt. But here’s a site that gets 1,000,000 page views every quarter (roughly) and we had earned zip. Zero. Nada.
Once I understand how to update a Mediawiki database, we’ll have Mediawiki comments instead, and I’ve exported what we had from Disqus.
It’s been a bad run, but there you go.
Media.net also said they would drop publishers from certain countries, without naming them. That was fine by me since they also had odd discrepancies between what I knew to be the traffic and what they recorded. At one point, the Media.net ad code was hard-coded on Autocade’s pages, and still they were recording a minuscule amount of traffic.
With time zone differences (their person was in India) we never solved it.
Maybe an inordinate amount of people use ad blockers?
We had till February 28 to remove their code but I took it off as well—no point dragging out yet another non-paying service.
It really feels like yet another area where Google has wrecked the advertising ecosystem for legitimate publishers. Oh for the days when there was more quality control over where ads appeared.
Ten years ago, we were hacked. That is a story in itself, which I documented at the time, along with Google’s failings. What also struck me was that the hack used what appeared to be Google Adsense code:
I had come across fake ads taking you to malware sites before, even with legitimate ad networks. (I still remember seeing a fake ad for a job-seeking website that wound up on our sites in April 2008.) But for some reason in 2013 it still seemed strange, since I didn’t deal with Google and some legit ad networks were still hanging on.
However, I noted on April 7, 2013, when researching what had happened, that it was entirely possible. And Google makes money no matter what.
I wrote: ‘The publisher’s site gets blacklisted and it takes days for that to be lifted, so the earnings go down. Who gains? The hackers and Google.’
The quotations I included in the 2013 post are sobering, with other publishers negatively affected by Google’s systems and inaction.
This week, almost 10 years later, I came across this.
Google, still useless after all these years. But hey, as long as they’re making money, right? Because the rest of us sure as heck aren’t, at least not through anything they touch. Their core business is a negligence lawsuit just waiting to happen.
Tags: 2013, 2023, advertising, Autocade, Disqus, fraud, GIMP, Google, internet, JY&A Media, law, Lucire, publishing, software, World Wide Web
Posted in business, China, internet, marketing, media, publishing, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
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