Ka wehi ta ratou kaupapa here, ko hiahia kōrero te reo Māori ahau. People are waking up to how bad Google has become, if posts on Mastodon are any indication. What’s disappointing are the replies, usually saying they have switched to Duck Duck Go because it’s so much better, and others saying Kagi is […]
Category: USA
Posts relating to the USA.
Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play
I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago. In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]
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Cloudflare’s unpredictable blocks could come in handy
A few weeks ago, I removed Design Taxi from our links’ list because I received this: so I assumed the site had gone or had made a decision to block certain people or countries. But it turns out that it hasn’t and I now have egg on my face. I’ve no idea why […]
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As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social
My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]
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Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update
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 […]
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NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing
How interesting to read in Nieman Reports that six months on, NPR has barely felt a thing after leaving OnlyKlans, the site formerly known as Twitter. NPR told its staff that its traffic has dropped by ‘a single percentage point’, according to Nieman Reports, and before that, traffic from OnlyKlans made up less than two […]
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Testing the big three occidental search engines on site: searches again
Thanks to a conversation on Mastodon (which was going quite nicely till the other person lost their temper and concluded that anyone who criticizes Duck Duck Go must be a Google shill) I wanted to see if Bing had recovered on the group of sites I used to run through the search engines. It’s been […]
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Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years
Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’. Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified. I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]
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Google search is worse by design—internal memo
You didn’t imagine it: Google’s search is worse, and that’s by design, according to a document produced in discovery. Dr Jonny L. Saunders of UCLA shared one on their Mastodon earlier today. The internal Google email, from Jerry Dischler to Anil Sabharwal, dated May 3, 2019, expresses a concern over the company missing […]
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Nice to be back on The Panel
David McCallum with Melinda Fee and Craig Stevens in The Invisible Man. (Who’d have guessed? Illya Kuryakin and Peter Gunn on the same show!) Haven’t had this much fun on RNZ’s The Panel ever—since for once I knew my fellow panellist, Alison Mau. Both Ali and I weren’t in the studio with Wallace Chapman, […]