Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’

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 […]

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Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again

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 […]

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

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 […]

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How Mojeek, Google, Bing and Brave perform on a site: search here

Here’s an update on how three of the western search engines I’ve been watching are performing, with a site search here (site:jackyan.com). The traffic here is still well down on 2022, I believe caused by two main things: a worsening Google that is failing to pick up PHP pages; and the collapse of the Bing […]

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ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]

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Bing Chat doesn’t pull from web page content—according to Bing Chat

I had a bit of fun with Bing Chat last week, during which I got it to admit that when it searches the Bing index, it does not look at the content of the web pages. Bing Chat says it only has access to the snippet, URL and date.     Of course, it lies, […]

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Mojeek v. Google v. Bing on a site: search—Google still largely failing to pick up PHP

After seeing how badly Google performed with site:jackyan.com, I wanted to get on record how it was with Lucire. I already knew it failed to pick up many PHP pages, preferring the static ones of HTML, but I didn’t realize just how bad it got. I’m pretty sure it’s worse now than even two weeks […]

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Autocade reaches 31 million page views

  It took four months but Autocade’s finally at 31 million page views, having made it to 3,352,136 this morning (April 2). That smaller number is the page views since the program was reinstalled last year. Add that to the last recorded total before the reinstallation of 27,647,011, and you have 30,999,147. At c. 10,000 […]

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It’s not just us: Google fares poorly for site: search for Quartz

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 […]

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How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware

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 […]

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