When anti-capitalists love billionaires

29.11.2023/12.20

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 […]

Google can’t even find a specific name properly

23.11.2023/11.10

My apologies to the late screenwriter Murray Smith’s family for using him as an example for this search engine analysis, but it proves a point of how useless Google is. Apart from the Companies’ Office in the UK, there’s very little recorded about Murray by his legal name. This blog is one of the few […]

Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update

01.11.2023/11.10

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 […]

Autocade traffic back on track, with 33 million page views

24.10.2023/00.06

Yesterday must have been a record day at Autocade with 41,000 page views recorded in 24 hours. What I didn’t realize was that we have crossed the 33 million page view mark, since the counter was reset in March 2022 and I forgot what I needed to add to get the total. The last […]

Testing the big three occidental search engines on site: searches again

16.10.2023/09.44

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 […]

A keyword might help in a Bing site: search

30.08.2023/02.26

After I suggested that Mike Masnick of Techdirt try out Mojeek for his site:techdirt.com search, since Bing was coming up blank, he decided he would try the search with Techdirt as his keyword (which is what Mojeek requires by design: it doesn’t site searches without search terms; here he would have had to do site:techdirt.com […]

Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)

23.08.2023/10.18

Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the […]

Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’

16.08.2023/01.34

Rod Hilton, on how terrible Google is getting. This isn’t down to the web being worse, as Marissa Mayer laughably claims. This is down to Google focusing on its surveillance capitalism-based ad business, which earns most of its revenues, over search. It hasn’t been a search-centred company for decades. And I thought its […]

Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again

13.08.2023/00.00

Props to Mojeek again. I gave them feedback about how lucir was coming up for a search about Lucire. There is a search engine convention that identifies root words and delivers variants, but I argued that as I was querying a capitalized word, maybe Lucire should appear further up top. To their credit, this now […]

Techdirt’s down to zero results on Bing; meanwhile, Bing shows 1,760 for Lucire

27.07.2023/22.10

Hat tip to Leighelse on this one, when she alerted me on Mastodon. @DuckDuckGo @yegg Would either of you know, please, and is DDG in a position to help? Our search box is a DDG one (and has been for a long time) and seeing it come up empty constantly since March is disheartening. https://t.co/Wg8CoTq8cg […]