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 […]
Read More… from Autocade traffic back on track, with 33 million page views
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 […]
Read More… from Testing the big three occidental search engines on site: searches again
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 […]
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, 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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again
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 […]
Read More… from Techdirt’s down to zero results on Bing; meanwhile, Bing shows 1,760 for Lucire
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 […]
Read More… from How Mojeek, Google, Bing and Brave perform on a site: search here
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. […]
Read More… from ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all
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, […]
Read More… from Bing Chat doesn’t pull from web page content—according to Bing Chat