Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?

Now isn’t that interesting? After posting about Semrush on their Reddit, where their error is laid bare for all to see, I have now had a blissful 48 hours where there were no new disinformation posts about yours truly pop up on Google searches. So much for Semrush claiming that it could not remove a […]

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Autocade reaches 39 million page views

Here we are, 39 million page views on Autocade, as the stats’ counter ticked over to 11,361,125 earlier today (which we add to the previous installation’s 27,647,011). It’s two months, 16 days since we were at 38 million, and as July and August were leap months, that’s 78 days. Last time it was 50 days. […]

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“AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade

I’m surprised that people are surprised that this is where Facebook is going. In the words of my friend Richard MacManus, in reference to this interview with Mark Zuckerberg in The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg basically just confirmed that your feeds will soon be full of AI-generated content. Another reason the fediverse needs to exist: so […]

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If you’re still writing disinformation after all this, then tech is your master, and you are the slave

  If you peel away the technobabble of what Semrush said to me on Reddit, basically their algorithm messed up when it included an unspaced version of my name. It wasn’t trending. It was just an extrapolation made by an algorithm that, unfortunately, had a very negative consequence for me. But it also didn’t help […]

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Semrush finally explains how my (unspaced) name wound up in their system

Posting on Reddit has elicited something from Semrush, with Vic on their team writing this in response to me.     Hi Jack, sorry for any confusion—I’ve been discussing the case with my team internally to make sure we’re all on the same page. Our system aims to predict trends using various signals, but sometimes […]

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Semrush doesn’t care about potentially botched data, or resulting disinformation; offers useless advice

PS., September 18, 1000 UTC: Semrush has reached out to me privately and seems willing to look into things. I won’t divulge private messages but this could be the breakthrough I had hoped for.   P.PS., September 20: This is the follow-up.   Semrush has responded on Reddit to what I posted yesterday: it helps […]

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On the Semrush subreddit: ‘How the Keyword Magic Tool made my year hell’

Since emailing Semrush got nowhere, and sending a release to the search engine press got nowhere, maybe posting to their subreddit might work. Of course, it might get deleted. It might even make things worse and spark copycats. Who knows? But what choice do I have after nine months? How the Keyword Magic Tool made […]

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Semrush, according to a customer: ‘Their data made no sense’

From a user on Reddit, _cth_. Need I say more? Semrush doesn’t care about how bad their product is, or the effect it has on the public.     Here’s someone paying US$14,000 per month for junk, so imagine how bad the data must be for the free or lower-paying users. I would be surprised […]

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Online history lesson

  It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]

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Time to go to each host and take down the disinformation websites

I’ve indulged these buggers for long enough: over the last few weeks, I began going to the web hosts of the disinformation writers. Hostinger has been excellent, giving the writers three days to prove what they wrote is genuine, and, of course, 100 per cent of them fail. A UK host called 20i has just […]

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