Archive for March 2023


It’s not just us: Google fares poorly for site: search for Quartz

27.03.2023

Not all of you will have caught the postscript to yesterday’s post. I wanted to see if Google was doing as bad a job with other Wordpress-only websites, and one of the most famous is Quartz.

Sure enough, it was. Of the top 50 for site:qz.com, 33 pages were author, tag or category pages (let’s just say indices for want of a better term). Only 17 were articles.

Quartz is properly famous with a big crew, so the fact Google can’t get a site: search right there, either, shows how bad things must be.

Here’s where the articles appear based on each 10-result page in Google:
 
01–10 ★
11–20 ★★
21–30 ★★★★★★★★
31–40 ★★
41–50 ★★★★
 
In other words, on the first page, there was one article (in fifth). On the second page, two. The third page, happily, there were eight, but the number drops again for the fourth and fifth.

It’s really not the behaviour you expect from a search engine, and as far as I know, till recently, Google operated normally.
 

 

How does Mojeek, whose spider and site operate normally, fare on this test? Better.
 
01–10 ★★★★★★★
11–20 ★★★★★★★★★★
21–30 ★★★★
31–40 ★
41–50
 

I’m not saying the massive number of author pages starting from page 3 is good, but at least Mojeek is putting them in later, which is what you’d expect. I’d personally prefer they be later still, or not show up at all, for this type of search.

Out of fun, let’s look at Bing:
 
01–06 ★★
07–16 ★★★★★★★★★
17–26 ★★★★★★★★★
27–36 ★★★★★★★★★
37–46 ★★★★★★★★★
47–56 ★★★★★★★★★
 
Yes, there were a lot of repeats (probably around 40 per cent again) and Bing oddly could only deliver six results on the first page, but those results are roughly what you’d expect: a lot of articles and some top-level pages on the first page. It even allowed me to go beyond 56, which is an achievement. Other than the repeated results, Bing delivered results that were closer to what was expected.
 
Earlier today, I discovered one setting in a Wordpress SEO plug-in that allowed tag pages to be indexed on Lucire’s website. That was never a problem till now, but I’ve turned it off. Sorry, Whangarei residents. I’ve asked Google not to make you the fashion capital of the world by having your tag appear first.

On this blog, tag pages were already selected for exclusion, but Google prefers unchanging, static HTML, and that’s another story.


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How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware

26.03.2023

After the last post, you may be thinking: surely if my site was entirely PHP, Google wouldn’t have a problem identifying which were the most important articles? They are the biggest search engine in the world and all that data would ensure that they knew how to rank the dynamic pages properly. They would have some idea, based on who is clicking on what, which pages should be placed up high in a site: search.

You might have been right in the past, but in 2023, you’d be wrong.

Just as with Lucire and my personal site (both of which are sites with a mixture of static HTML and dynamic PHP pages), Google does a terrible job. With Lucire, PHP drives the news section. The top PHP page Google shows with site:lucire.com comes in second, which is great, and it’s the main news page on the site. But beyond that, not a single PHP-driven news article appears in the top 100 results on Google. There are repeat pages, a bug that Google has introduced as it follows Bing in padding out the results.

There are some PHP pages though, namely pages containing tags. But even those make no sense in terms of ordering. The first is in no. 11, a PHP-generated index of pages tagged with Whangarei. I repeated the search and this result fell to no. 16. Other tags on the second page of results were for 2020 and Bulgari. There is no public tag cloud any more, but I seem to recall the actual top one is Lucire, followed by fashion.

So even on tags, Google gets the ranking very wrong in a site: search, and there is nothing on the site that would lead its spider to think Whangarei needed to be so high. The visits to the site do not bear this out as well.

When you look at a site like Lucire Rouge, which is entirely PHP, it’s an incredible surprise to find that its top pages are dominated by tags, categories and authors’ pages, plus many contents’ pages. These follow the home and contact pages. Again, there are no article pages in the top 100. You can find out for yourself using site:lucirerouge.com. Or better yet, try out a site you know and see if it follows the same pattern.
 

 

I recall there was a Wordpress SEO plug-in that helped you manage these, ridding you of the tag and other contents’ pages, but Google never needed its hand held so badly before. And if I can’t remember what that plug-in was or how it worked, how does the regular punter? (I have a feeling the plug-in we used became obsolete, or was it inside Wordpress as standard? Your guess is as good as mine. I couldn’t find it when I wrote this blog post, but then a lot of websites are no longer intuitive to use.)

With Lucire Men, also entirely PHP, you have to get to page 5 and result no. 43 before you encounter the first article; the first 42 are tag pages or other forms of contents’ pages. Nos. 44, 45 and 46 are also articles. Then it’s back to the indices before page 6 shows all articles.

Individual dynamic pages or posts—those generated by Wordpress, for instance—now appear to be far too difficult for Google to handle. If your site uses Wordpress, expect Google to have difficulty with it now; it certainly answers why this blog’s visits have fallen so badly if Google no longer shows posts up top in a site: search. It means it doesn’t really rate them, so how on earth would I expect them to show up in a search for the topics being covered?

It’s pretty disappointing to see Google search fall so quickly in such a short space of time.
 
Of course there are exceptions, and Google seems to do reasonably well on a site:autocade.net search. That site, run on Mediawiki, is all PHP as well, and the results are today as I recall them ages ago. The ones up top have been pretty popular—certainly they are for models that are among the top pages on the site. And that’s how Google should behave. Goodness knows why it can’t handle Wordpress properly any more.

The only oddity here is that Google estimates it has 2,960 results. Mojeek, the search engine whose spider works properly and delivers results as expected, has 3,277. It’s probably the first site I’ve observed where Mojeek has more pages indexed than Google. Is it the beginning of the shift where Mojeek has a larger and more relevant index than Google?
 

 
 
PS., 9.42 p.m. UTC: Sure enough, it’s not just us. Quartz is pretty famous, and they’re run off Wordpress exclusively. Most of their top pages for site:qz.com are tag and author ones, too, though their first article, one which I couldn’t imagine would be their top story, appears as result no. 5. Quartz gets a ton of traffic, but Google can’t do right by them, either.


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Got dynamic pages or a WordPress blog? Don’t expect Google to rank your pages highly

25.03.2023

That was short-lived. Bing’s back to offering 55 results for Lucire, and when you go through them, c. 40 per cent are repeated from page to page. However, a lot of the results are from the 2020s now, of both static and dynamic pages, so that’s something. There’s still a handful of truly ancient pages that haven’t been linked for decades, too.

This blog’s views are down dramatically, though as I haven’t fed in site:jackyan.com often into any search engine, it’s hard to say what the cause is. However, it’s more likely than not that Google has caused this, because this very search nets only results for static pages until page 7 except for the home page of this blog.

I note from a search of this blog that the first time site:jackyan.com is recorded was in July 2022, and I had checked Google. Obviously nothing had jumped out back then—it would have jumped out at me—and Google’s pivot to antiquity, is a recent phenomenon. Even on January 16, 2023, I didn’t note that anything was strange with a Google search I performed.

No, it was this month when I noticed how old the Google results were for this domain.

Here are the first 50 results visualized.
 

 
It’d be fine if the year was 2013, since most of the pages that Google shows up top are from that year. The rest are older.

I know there’s an argument for removing obsolete pages, but I am of the earlier school of thinking where webmasters were advised:

  • don’t make 404s: if the page still exists then just let it be there, because
  • if it’s not linked from anywhere current, it won’t show up, or show up later in the results;
  • search engines will downrank things that are buried or only linked from pages that are deep within the site, and uprank things that are current and linked from more recently crawled pages.

When it comes to Google, these were truths as well, but it appears after 20-odd years, they are no longer.

Put simply, Google has real trouble indexing dynamic pages and ranking them highly, and the same is found with site:lucire.com. That means this blog’s entries are no longer being found or ranked highly.

What should the behaviour be? Mojeek is instructive, since the spider behaves as a spider should and the results show a more normal mix of static and dynamic. I should note that despite Bing’s obvious limitations (though at the time of writing it claims it has 1,860) it manages to include static and dynamic, too, with two dynamic in the top 10, and eight (one of which is a repeat) in slots 11–20. Overall, it’s closer to what one expects, too.

Below is the same graph for Mojeek.
 

 

The lesson? Got dynamic pages, like a Wordpress blog? New content in that blog? Then don’t expect much from Google as it clearly prefers static HTML. It has followed what Bing was last year, a repository for antiquity. Bing’s index may be shot, but it no longer is about the old stuff. Let’s hope Google, as it copies Bing, gets back into delivering more relevant results as well, and has a spider that functions in the way we all understand. For a market leader, it sure seems pretty clueless.

All the more reason to use Mojeek then.


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If you take out Tiktok, then why not Meta, too?

24.03.2023

The Hon Debbie Ngarewa-Packer MP was right when she questioned our government’s decision to ban Tiktok from parliamentary devices.

If it’s about foreigners getting hold of data, then why not ban Facebook and Instagram?

Last I looked, Tiktok had not, unlike Facebook, been party to any genocides.

Parliamentary Services says at least Meta is American and operates in line with our values. So being party to genocide is in line with our values? So information leaking to the likes of Cambridge Analytica—and its effects on democracy—are in line with our values?

It’s all about hopping on an occidental bandwagon over unproven claims that Tiktok hands stuff over to the PRC.

And if it is proven, then let us see the proof.

Let’s say our government doesn’t have the proof but it’s using Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US as a proxy of how data from social media companies wind up with their governments. That’s actually a fair point and we should expect that it’s probably happening. We can make a pretty reasoned guess that it is.

In that case, it’s all the more reason we should consider banning the lot of them, not just Tiktok. Keep our data in our country.

Remember, we’re not banning any of these platforms from private citizens, just what can be used by our Parliament. If it’s about private citizens, I’d be advising that we take out known disinformation ones, which are often funded or manipulated by shady overseas backers or even nation states. They’re literally placing New Zealanders in harm’s way. That would mean a pretty wide net, too, and I imagine no one in power would want to wield that responsibility. Or that the penny will drop, as it usually does, 10 years too late. (Hello, readers of 2033!)
 
Literally as I was completing the title and meta (small m) description fields for this, this Mastodon post from an ethics’ professor appeared.
 

 

In case it ever disappears, she writes:

As your resident TikTok micro-celebrity + tech ethics/policy professor, I have a lot of feelings about the proposed TikTok ban. I think that this statement from Evan Greer of Fight for the Future articulates some points well. If the sole argument is “but China” I would very much like to see something beyond speculation. And if it’s just not that, then go after Meta too. And either way maybe you could pass LITERALLY ANY DATA PRIVACY LAWS.


 

The image is from the Fight for the Future website, and the text reads:

“If it weren’t so alarming, it would be hilarious that US policymakers are trying to ‘be tough on China’ by acting exactly like the Chinese government. Banning an entire app used by millions of people, especially young people, LGBTQ folks, and people of color, is classic state-backed Internet censorship,” said Evan Greer (she/her), director of Fight for the Future. “TikTok uses the exact same surveillance capitalist business model of services like YouTube and Instagram. Yes, it’s concerning that the Chinese government could abuse data that TikTok collects. But even if TikTok were banned, they could access much of the same data simply by purchasing it from data brokers, because there are almost no laws in place to prevent that kind of abuse. If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone.”


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The golden age of Pontiac illustrations

17.03.2023

The gargantuan full-size 1971–6 Pontiacs (Laurentian, Catalina, Parisienne, Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari) went up on Autocade last week, and they reminded me of the golden era of Pontiac illustrations. That era didn’t stretch into the 1970s that much: you saw them for the 1967s through to the 1971s, before photography took over.

I had some saved up over the years on the hard drive, and a few went into my blog gallery when that was still public (Google will have you believe it still is, with a lot of their top 50 devoted to it; so much for that search engine updating quickly).

First up is the 1967 Bonneville, with its sharp, new grille emphasizing width and sportiness. I believe this image came by way of Twitter, pre-Musk.

Here’s the 1969 Bonneville, probably the year that was the zenith for a lot of GM divisions’ designs.

I’m unclear on the origins of this scan, but it was shared on OnlyKlans when I used it. It’s the 1969 Firebird 400.

From the gallery are the 1969 GTO convertible and Firebird, showing just how right these two designs were for the era.

And here are two 1971 Canadian Pontiacs, the Laurentian and the Parisienne Brougham, which sat on the 124 in wheelbase rather than the 126 in of the US Bonneville, Grand Ville and Grand Safari that year. You can feel the white country club of the 1960s just barely hanging on before the decade gave way to more brown shades and gritty urban decay. The garish pointy noses (which Bunkie Knudsen tipped Ford off to when he went to work there) and vinyl roofs all contributed to a heaviness that the decade characterizes for me.


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Bing is coming back to life

12.03.2023

In quite an unexpected about-turn, Bing began spidering Lucire’s website again, and not just the old stuff. A site:lucire.com search actually has pages from after 2009 now, and while 42 per cent of results still get repeated from page to page, there are actually pages from the 2010s and the 2020s.

There are still a few ancient pages that have not been linked for a long time. And while Bing claims it has 1,420 results now (considerably more than 10), it won’t show beyond the 56 mark, so some things haven’t changed much.

Still, it’s a positive development worth reporting. The new pages at Autocade also seem to have made it on to Bing, almost instantaneously, or at least within a couple of hours (although Bing claims it only has 22 results for site:autocade.net, a far cry from the 5,000-plus actually on there).

But for the sake of fairness, here’s how Bing’s looking in terms of year breakdowns among the top 50 results (with the repeats taken out). The pattern is beginning to resemble a real search engine’s.
 

 
Contents’ pages ★★★
1997
1998
1999 ★★
2000
2001
2002 ★
2003
2004
2005 ★
2006 ★
2007 ★
2008 ★★
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015 ★
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021 ★★★★
2022 ★★★★★★★★
2023 ★★★★★
 
Static ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Dynamic ★★★★★★★
 

Maybe that ChatGPT foray gave the search team more money so it can start plugging the servers back in.

Still, I won’t be returning to Duck Duck Go as a default. Bing’s 1,420 is still a fraction of what Mojeek has for Lucire, and who wants to expose their internal-search users to Microsoft?

I’ll see if I can update the spreadsheet soon as I wouldn’t want you to think I only did so when there was bad news.
 
PS.: Here’s the spreadsheet containing Bing’s claimed number of results from a random (randomly among ones I could think of when I first began this analysis) selection of websites. Not universally up at Bing—though Microsoft has more pages on itself than it has done for a while. Cf. the previous one here. Mojeek is the only one consistently adding pages to its record.
 


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The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived

12.03.2023

This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt.
 

 

A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even seen professional advertisements set on a Selectric here. And because of all that exposure, it was pretty obvious to those of us with an interest in type that all the glyphs were designed to set widths regardless of family, and the only one that looked vaguely right was the Selectric version of Times.

Jens goes into a lot more detail but, sure enough, my hunch (from the 1980s and 1990s) was right: Times was indeed the starting-point, and the engineers refused to budge even when Adrian Frutiger worked out average widths and presented them.

It’s why this version of Univers, or Selectric UN, was so compromised.

What I didn’t know was that Frutiger was indeed hired for the gig, to adapt his designs to the machine. I had always believed, because of the compromised design, that IBM did it themselves or contracted it to a specialist, but not the man himself.

There’s plenty of maths involved, but the sort I actually would enjoy (having done one job many years ago to have numerous type families meet the New Zealand Standard for signage, and having to purposefully botch the original, superior kerning pairs in order to achieve it).

I think I kept our IBM golfballs, which carried the type designs on them, and hopefully one day they’ll resurface as they’re a great, nostalgic souvenir of these times.

What is really bizarre reading Jens’s recollection of his digital revival is that it’s set in Selectric UN 11 Medium (an excerpt is shown above). Here is type that was set on to paper, now re-created faithfully, with all of its compromises, for the screen. He’s done an amazing job and it was like reading a schoolbook from the 1970s (but with far more interesting subject-matter). Those Selectric types might not have been the best around, but the typographic world is richer for having them revived.
 
The hits per post here have fallen off a cliff. I imagine we can blame Google. Seven hundred was a typical average, but now I’m looking at dozens. I thought they’d be happy with my obsession over Bing being so crappy during 2022, but then, if they’re following Bing and not innovating, maybe they weren’t. Or that post about their advertising business being a negligence lawsuit waiting to happen (which, incidentally, was one of the most hit pieces over the last few months) might not have gone down well—it was a month after that when the incoming hits to this blog dropped like a stone. Maybe that confirms the veracity of my post.

I’m not terribly surprised. And before you think, ‘Why would Google care?’, ‘Would they bother targeting you?’ or ‘You are so paranoid,’ remember that Google suspended Vivaldi’s advertising account after its CEO criticized them, and in the days of Google Plus, they censored posts that I made that were critical of them. Are they after me? No, but you can bet there are algorithms that work to minimize or censor sites that expose Google’s misbehaviour, regardless of who makes the allegations, just as posts were censored on Google Plus.


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There is no point to posting on Twitter

08.03.2023

The demise of Twitter continues. Today I saw, while heading back to Tawa from Papakōwhai, the aftermath of a seven-vehicle accident (three cars, four commercial vehicles) on the opposite side of State Highway 1.

I posted this on Mastodon, and, made an exception and did a fresh message on OnlyKlans, I mean, Twitter. You know, the website where they let Nazis back in, and where today its proprietor mocked a disabled man with muscular dystrophy. Seems to be in keeping in a country where certain states are going after trans people and women’s rights that a disabled man would be next.
 

 

Net result of the posts in the first hour and a bit: four favourites and four boosts on Mastodon.

Absolutely nothing on Twitter.

I admit the messages were not identical and I called Twitter ‘OnlyKlans’, which might have ensured it didn’t get seen. That’s with hindsight. But since 2022, during a lot of which I had a cross-poster going between the two sites, this has been typical. Twitter engagement began to decline while Mastodon’s rose. Getting to eight–nil is completely on trend as I’ve had crickets to other Tweets, too.

I’ll know for next time. There really is no point, even when doing a public service, to announce a thing on OnlyKlans.

And the last few companies I Tweeted, because there were no other contact points (no phone numbers, no email addresses), didn’t reply, with the exception of Fiverr (who dealt with someone selling fake services). Google, of course, I expected nothing from, but Scottish Pacific Finance couldn’t be bothered, either.

This seems appropriate:
 

 

And this is useful context to the fediverse:
 


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Nostalgia is not a business strategy

06.03.2023

Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, as Marx probably nails it far better than a lot of other commentators.

There were aspects of the good old days I liked, too. Better CPM rates for online ads. Way more creativity in web design, as well as experimentation. The fact I could balance doing brand consulting, typeface design, and publishing. That helped my creativity flow. But these are rose-coloured glasses; there’s plenty about my current life that is far better than those hairy start-up days.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in half a century on earth is that you can’t re-create the past. And even if you could, it wouldn’t be as good as how you remembered it.

I’m often nostalgic for those early days in Hong Kong and that mega-fantastic day of the Tung Wan Hospital fair in 1975 (or was it ’76?), where I got to go in the bucket of a Simon Snorkel fire engine. Wonderful day. But at the time I couldn’t drive (I was three), so you can’t have it all.

And millennium me running Lucire might have been having fun in terms of breaking new ground, but I’d much rather be where I am now having talked to Rachel Hunter and putting her on the home page (and in two print editions). Our stories are also heaps better than what they were in the late 1990s.
 

 

Just enjoy the moment and make the most of where you are at. I’ve projects I want to return to, too, but if I do, I won’t be assuming the year is 2000 and working in an area I don’t know that much about, while annoying all the people around me.


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Another example of Google’s antiquity when it comes to search results

06.03.2023

Is Google now the Wayback Machine, too?

Since I haven’t used Google regularly since 2010, I can’t do what’s called a longitudinal study, though when I started examining search engine results for Lucire after Bing tanked last year, nothing in my Google searches jumped out at me—till earlier in 2023.

I guess wherever Bing goes, Google follows, since they’re not really innovators—they did well in search, but everything else seems to be about following or acquiring.

With Bing becoming Microsoft’s Wayback Machine, Google followed suit, as revealed when I did site:lucire.com searches. But was it the exception?

Not really: site:jackyan.com still shows my mayoral campaign pages, even though they haven’t been linked since the day before the 2013 mayoral election. And site:jyanet.com, which I tried at the weekend, has some ancient things, there, too.

Like Bing, Google has some trouble crossing into this side of 2010.

Let’s look at the top 10.
 

 

1. Home page. Current, so that’s good. And at least it’s the home page. Bing doesn’t always give you one.

2. CAP Online, last updated 2008, and very sporadically between 2001 and 2008. I don’t think we’ve linked it since then. Maybe, at best, a year later.

3. Lucire’s original home page from 1997. This hasn’t been linked since we got Lucire its own domain in 1998—25 years ago.

4. Our press information pages. Fair enough, and current.

5. JY&A Media. Relevant and currently linked.

6. JY&A Consulting’s old page. Hasn’t been linked by us since 2010. I imagine some might still link to it? But it gets a 404, and has done for a long time. Why rank it so highly?

7. JY&A Fonts. Current and relevant; I would have thought it would rank more highly.

8–10. Press releases from between 2007 and 2009.

I’ve benefited from search engines grandfathering things, but I really couldn’t believe my eyes with pages we haven’t linked to in anywhere between 13 and 25 years. And not that many people would have maintained their links to these pages, either. Certainly the Fonts and Media pages should be up further with links in, and current internal links on our site.

For (6), I don’t have the knowledge to do 301s and a refresh page might penalize jya.co, where the Consulting website is today.

When we took the site to HTTPS last year, both experts and friends told me that it would take a matter of days or weeks for Google to restore its position; that one would not get penalized for going to a secure server. That, I discovered, was not the case. Search engines don’t update, not as regularly as you might think. If what I am seeing is any indication, search engines in 2023 have massive trouble updating, and the top 10 reflect the status of your website as it was a long time ago. For jyanet.com, the top 10 would be perfect if it was 2009; for jackyan.com, it’s how things were in 2013; and for lucire.com, it’s a bit more of a hybrid of what was current in 2005 (framesets! And the old entertainment page) and some pages from after 2011 (including current home and shopping pages).

I don’t care how Google defends itself or blames others for its decreasing ability to find relevant pages; it’s blatantly obvious its search has worsened.


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