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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 on 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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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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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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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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