It has been a long time since I looked at how the three main occidental search engines—Mojeek, Google and Bing—were performing with a site: search and whether they could pick up dynamic pages. As I did in April, I’m trying it with site:lucire.com, which has both static and dynamic content.
Mojeek is fairly consistent, but how things have changed with Google and Bing.
Here’s Mojeek first:
A mix of static and dynamic. Pink result no. 20 is a dynamic index page (a tag page generated by Wordpress), rather than an individual article. It’s a bit heavy on the static pages from result 21 onwards, and they all happen to be from this year, but at least the top 20 shows a mixture from past and present.
My earlier test showed a similar pattern, but the results from the 20s had more of a variety of years (though they were still mostly 2023), and all but one after position 25 was static.
Here’s Google, and how things have changed:
In 2022 it was Bing that could not show many pages in a site: search. But as I said last year, Google follows Bing. Bing was incapable of showing more than 10 pages sometimes, and what it did show was pretty old. Here’s Google now only capable of showing 20 pages. In fact, here’s that search page, as shot on Vivaldi, to show that there are no more pages after the 20th result (and it wasn’t a one-off: I reloaded this page several times, and I’ve witnessed this in previous months):
Result no. 11 is a repeat of result no. 10. Google’s now even copying Bing by showing repeated results to pad things out, though it doesn’t get as bad as Bing’s 40 per cent last year.
And all of Google’s results are static pages: it struggles to show dynamic ones.
In fact, Bing gets the “most improved” award. It claims to have 2,170 results and can actually show more than 1,000 now (I took it to 1,020 but have in the past taken it to the last page).
What’s there is a mixture of static and dynamic. The home page is repeated in result no. 2, and the dynamic pages are usually newer. Bing still has an awful lot of old stuff, including framesets from 2002 that haven’t been linked in two decades in the top 10, and goodness knows why everything between 2009 and 2021 is missing from the top 49.
Yes, 49. Bing displays, on the fifth results’ page, results 40 to 49. The next page are results 51 to 60. There’s no sign of result 50. But it’s doing better than old man Google, who also loves a couple of 2002-era framesets that haven’t been linked in decades.
I don’t know why the American search engines are so obsessed with antiquity in the top 10.
These days, with Mojeek having more Autocade pages than either Google or Bing, it gets top marks from me for any site: search, and I’m happy to continue with it as my default. They always respond to feedback when I report that the results aren’t up to snuff, and I’ve seen things improve markedly since I began using it as a default in 2022.
Google just conks out. We know it’s getting worse, as it’s their company policy. Bing might have recovered in terms of the quantity of results for this domain, but it’s still very inconsistent between websites. If the totals are to be believed, it trails them both—though Google demonstrates that it’s a far less capable search engine when it comes to actually showing you those results.
For obvious reasons, Google doesn’t rank my posts highly these days, since I keep calling the buggers out. And as you can see, it’s not even working properly anyway. So if you find these posts useful, please feel free to share them.
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