Putting the search engines through their paces

One more, and I might give the subject a rest. Here I test the search engines for the term Lucire. This paints quite a different picture. Lucire is an established site, dating from 1997, indexed by all major search engines from the start. The word did not exist online till the site began. It does […]

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Bing is definitely very broken, and it’s hurting Duck Duck Go

The last few days have been about ‘How awesome is Mojeek?’ and ‘How shit is Bing?’ I’m finding great search results from Mojeek, and as a site search for Lucire, it’s absolutely brilliant. Blows Duck Duck Go (Bing with privacy) away, even back when DDG had a reasonably comprehensive index of our pages (before the […]

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Forget Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Google—I’m trying Mojeek

It was disappointing to note that after switching to HTTPS, and signing on to Bing Webmaster Tools, the search engine results for those sites of ours that made the change are still severely compromised. I’ve written about searches for my own name earlier, where my personal and company sites lost their first and second positions […]

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Switch to HTTPS, lose your number one and two search-engine ranking

One annoying thing about switching the majority of our sites to HTTPS is losing our positions in the search engines. We were always told that HTTPS would lead to rises in search-engine ranking, and that being a mere HTTP would lead to Google downgrading you. The reality, as I’ve witnessed since we completed our server […]

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Don’t put your events on just Facebook—they won’t be seen

We’re probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as I’ve no wish to embarrass the organizers.    Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the ‘Johnsonville Community Hub’. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck […]

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Nine years of promoting DuckDuckGo in Lucire

Promoting DuckDuckGo: ‘Glancing back’ in Lucire KSA, June 2021. For some time now, in every print issue of Lucire, and Lucire KSA, there is a mention of search engine DuckDuckGo. But I wasn’t sure how long we had been doing this, till I checked tonight. We started referencing DuckDuckGo in 2012, on our history page, […]

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Like communist dictatorships, Google and Facebook threaten Australia

You know the US tech giants have way too much power, unencumbered by their own government and their own country’s laws, when they think they can strong-arm another nation.    From Reuter: Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Friday it would block its search engine in Australia if the government proceeds with a new code that […]

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Even the web is forgetting our history

Hernán Piñera/Creative Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0 My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: ‘Because far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable […]

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Finding an Android browser that works without fuss is harder than you think

With my last two cellphones, I’ve not used the default browser. I usually opted for Firefox, and in December 2018, I believe that’s what I did on my then-new Meizu M6 Note.    I don’t recall it being too problematic, but the type on some sites displayed a tad small, so I sampled a few […]

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Why paywalls are getting more prevalent; and The Guardian Weekly rethought

Megan McArdle’s excellent op–ed in The Washington Post, ‘A farewell to free journalism’, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. It’s a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a […]

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