Websites and the internet in general.
Having seen the number of results for Autocade drop on Mojeek—something which they said was unlikely—I thought it was about time I ran another series of site: tests, using our random cross-section. And I have to report that for some sites, the drop is real. I can’t speak for whether the others have actually removed […]
Read More… from Testing the occidental search engines with site:—Bing most improved
I know, if you search, you’re bound to find an opinion that matches yours, and pretty quickly, too. Bhagwad Park (in either Ontario or Florida—I assume one of the addresses on his site hasn’t been updated) happens to agree with me about AWS, except he breaks things down far better, being an expert on web […]
Again via Ben Daubney’s blog, which I found yesterday, a site called They See Your Photos, which uses Google’s Vision API to infer information about you. If you feed in a photo, the site provides Google’s output, and it is eerie what they are capable of “seeing”. However, the single photo’s output is not accurate, […]
Ben Daubney has an excellent post titled ‘The web used to be a reliable library. AI has ruined it.’ A real-life Duck Duck Go (Bing) search he ran netted him six “AI slop” entries in the top 10, and I’m betting that Google isn’t any better. If search engines had kept up with the game, […]
I’m told by Mojeek that this should not happen but it has. In October 2023, it had 3,103 results for a site: search for the original Autocade website, beating Google at 2,910 and Bing at 2,170. Mojeek is meant to build on its index but earlier this year, it dropped into the 700s. Currently site:autocade.net […]
Read More… from Substantial drop in site: results at Mojeek; is Ecosia now Google?
I haven’t used Google as a default search engine for 15 years, so odds are I haven’t witnessed its enshittification as gradually as most people. To me it is a surprise when I see new bugs and errors. Have these errors simply increased so imperceptibly over time that people just accept them? This […]
Read More… from Google searches aren’t straightforward any more
As Autocade World is a relatively new site, it has been interesting to see how some of the search engines have fared. It is a Wordpress site, which experience tells me presents a set of issues when it comes to search. Mojeek: barely anything. Four links to date, though an interesting mix of the home […]
Read More… from How the search engines fared with a new site
Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes: Post by @caseynewton View on Mastodon The bots steal, do not give attribution, and […]
Read More… from “AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023
There’s a lot of where advertising, marketing and tech have gone wrong on this blog, so what’s the right thing to do when you’re trying to sell your product? There’s the basic stuff we need to answer. We want people to buy our product, to solve a certain need, and they will do so because […]
Got to love the irrepressible Bob Hoffman. In his March 23 newsletter, he notes that Adlook studied target segments from popular data providers, and asked the people in those segments about themselves. I won’t spoil Bob’s entire list but the top two are: 47 per cent of the people who the data said were women […]