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, […]
Tag: 2020s
Substantial drop in site: results at Mojeek; is Ecosia now Google?
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 […]
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Google searches aren’t straightforward any more
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 […]
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Autocade at 42 million, kicked off Weibo, and random links
The anorak posts about Autocade milestones now appear on Autocade World, and we hit 42 million page views earlier this week. In other news, a pro-China political post saw my Weibo suspended ‘temporarily’, no sign on when this will be lifted. Hence the Weibo logo disappearing from the footer of this blog. It is a […]
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Common-sense economics
I haven’t commented on US politics much lately, primarily because there are others who do it far better. If you want excellent insight without being weighed down in detail, read what Richard Murphy in the UK has to say on, say, US tariffs, or the madness of austerity economics. His blog Funding the Future has […]
“AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023
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 […]
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Get your brand right and make it famous
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 […]
Ad tech is suspect
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 […]
Baidu’s “AI” image enhancement tested: clever, but like a hallucination
Baidu has been offering “AI” enhancement of its images for a while, and yesterday I bit the bullet, created an account, and trialled it. It was a press image that I had in high-res, but Baidu’s image search, strangely, only had a low-res version of it. Could its “AI” turn it into a high-res image? […]
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No matter how bad you had it, someone had it worse
Two things: I did say “AI” programs would ultimately make up false stories about us all. And what happened to me in 2024 was not as bad as what happened to Arve Hjalmar Holmen in Norway. There are still a few disinformation stories left about me—about four more where companies who would normally enforce their […]
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