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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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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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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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Pirates must love GoDaddy

04.03.2023

If you are a pirate, then GoDaddy seems to be the place to host.

Last November, we spotted three stolen articles on the sephari.co.nz domain, which appears to be hosted by GoDaddy. I filed two DMCA notices, to no avail.

They were in the standard format, one that GoDaddy requests and has acted on in the past.

The only thing I got back was this:

Your claim was received and will be reviewed and processed in the order that it was received. There is no need to submit the claim again. Thank you.
 
Kindest Regards,
 
D Preston
Go Daddy | Trademark & Copyright Claims

Come March and the articles are still there. So I filed another. Here is the body of the letter:

It appears that a GoDaddy customer has taken our work without permission. The infringing pages may be found at:
 
http://sephari.co.nz/museums/royal-new-zealand-ballet-debuts-12-works-digitally-on-may-12-lucire-lucire/
http://sephari.co.nz/culture/hands-on-in-the-midwest-lucire/
http://sephari.co.nz/culture/travel-in-brief-dining-with-vistajet-indonesian-celebrations-holland-americas-150th-lucire-lucire/
 
The originals of the above items are located at the following URLs:
 
https://lucire.com/insider/20220504/royal-new-zealand-ballet-debuts-12-works-digitally-on-may-12/
https://lucire.com/2022/1014vo0.shtml
https://lucire.com/insider/20221120/travel-in-brief-dining-with-vistajet-indonesian-celebrations-holland-americas-150th/
 

There is no contact point for this client, so we have come directly to you.

We do not believe that the unauthorized publication of our work can be defended under the fair use doctrine nor has it been licensed under Creative Commons. Its publication does not serve public policy. It is our copyrighted work, and we have never given permission for this party to feature it.

I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material or reference or link to such material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use).

I hereby state that the information in this notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the copyright or of an exclusive right under the copyright that is allegedly infringed.

I see D. Preston is on the case again. Here is what they said:

Dear Sir or Madam,
 
The website jyanet.com is not hosted by GoDaddy. We ask that you please note the following information:
 
The REGISTRAR is the company that sells a domain name registration to a person or company.
The REGISTRANT is the person or company that purchases a domain name for use.
The HOSTING PROVIDER is the company that provides space on it’s computers for the files that make up the content of the website.

That’s right. They’re telling me that my own company’s website is not hosted by them.

A website that does not appear anywhere in the complaint except for under my signature and in the reply address.

The rest is all mansplainy bollocks that says I should approach my own hosting provider to complain about myself.

I don’t know if they are illiterate, incompetent, obtuse, or overwhelmed.

But a pirate would simply love having a host that will run interference for them.

I wrote back:

Dear D. Preston:
 
Please read my complaint. Jyanet.com is not at issue here and I know you do not host it—as this is our company’s domain name.

It is not even mentioned in the attachment (which I am re-attaching): why would I file a complaint against ourselves?

The only place jyanet.com is mentioned is in my reply address.

Now, as in November when we filed our first DMCA notices with you, the complaint is about sephari.co.nz, which, based on our research, is hosted by you.

This has gone on for months.

I know the difference between registrar, registrant and hosting provider.

You were sent a standard letter in the format that you requested. A format that GoDaddy has acted on successfully before, not to mention other hosts.

I respectfully request you act on this copyright breach.

It’s not all doom and gloom. I had some fun with a couple of these people who hotlinked our images, while stealing the articles or spinning them.
 


 
Update, March 24: Finally a resolution, which coincidentally arrived at the same time I was asking connections on Mastodon to check if the domain was down. This took four months.
 


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Autocade is about to turn 15

03.03.2023


Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia, the most recent entry to Autocade.
 
Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I don’t expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008.

We did a single video under the Autocade name, which my friend Stuart Cowley filmed, edited and directed. But as we both have full-time jobs, it never took off into a series of web videos.

There could be a surprise development from Autocade that’s actually Amanda’s brainchild, but I’ll have to work out how much time is involved. It looks like the next major addition to the Autocade world will happen in its second 15 years. It won’t be an online magazine—I once registered a domain related to Autocade and stuck a Wordpress installation on it, but nothing came of it, and I gave up the name. Besides, there are plenty of entries already in the online automotive space, and I’m not interested in being a latecomer.

The original site is getting close to 31 million page views, which I am very happy about—not bad for a hobby, spare time site that so many have found some utility from. Thank you, everyone, for your visits and your interest—and big thanks to Nigel Dunn, Keith Adams, Peter Jobes, and my anonymous (at his request) friend for your huge contributions.

Extra thanks to Graham Clayton for being our number-one commenter (when we had Disqus forms running). I’ll be back with a “traffic report” during March, and maybe a hint of what we’re up to for Autocade in 2023.


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Nostalgic thoughts: what sparked my interest in fashion magazines, and Nike’s 10 rules for business

01.03.2023


 
I have told this story many times: I became interested in fashion magazines with a 1989 issue of Studio Collections. In fact, it was its fifth anniversary issue. I really liked the typesetting, photography and print quality. I was probably one of the few people disappointed when they went to desktop publishing and the typesetting quality deteriorated in the 1990s.

No such problem at Brogue (well, British Vogue) in 1991, which was still put together the old way. Coincidentally, my first issue of this venerable title was also an anniversary one, namely its 75th. Linda, Christy and Cindy were known to everyone, even young straight boys like me (actually, especially young straight boys like me). Here the visuals and the article quality were influential, and I had grown up reading largely British car magazines, such as Car and Autocar (though I began with Temple Press’s Motor in 1978). The British way of writing resonated with me and it was familiar territory.

My journey in this world, therefore, began eight years before I started Lucire, and the ideas had brewed for some time.

Yesterday we uploaded three articles from 1998 and they were quite terrible. I might have known what the benchmark was from the late 1980s and early 1990s, but we sure didn’t hit it in our writing a year after we started. I like to hope that we have since got there.
 
 

 
Someone shared Phil Knight’s 10 steps in business for Nike, when it was a fledgling enterprise back in the 1970s. I had seen this a long time ago, in the late 1980s, and even used to share it with my students in 1999–2000. I hadn’t seen it since.

They are aggressive and macho, which probably ties quite well in with Nike and its early days (John McEnroe was more than a suitable ambassador). They probably lend themselves quite well to sportswear. But a few of these are universal in business.

I like (7): ‘Your job isn’t done until the job is done,’ and the third of the eight ‘Dangers’: ‘Energy takers vs. energy givers’. Bureaucracy, naturally, heads that list of dangers, and rightly so.

You should ‘Assume nothing’ (5).

I don’t know if they still follow these tenets, but some definitely remain relevant.


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Of course Bing AI makes stuff up—Bing itself does

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.


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Free 2023 wall planner

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.


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Cory Doctorow might be predicting the end of the web as we know it

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.


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