After running my latest round of search engine site: tests, I think we can safely say that Bing has recovered in terms of its index size, and it’s no longer down where Alltheweb was in 2002. It actually has tens of millions of results for Microsoft’s own domain, and not a few lakh. This is, […]
Read More… from January 2025 site: tests on occidental search engines: Bing recovers
I noted in the new Autocade Year of Cars that the French faltered in China because the Chinese marques no longer need them, especially when they are churning out superior product. They have no use for French cachet, especially as the brands edge upmarket. You’ve got the HIMA collective from Huawei, all with luxury marques, […]
Read More… from We’ll all soon know luxury Chinese car brands
The web is full of bollocks these days, thanks to Google rewarding junk. Here’s The European Business Review, which looks like a legit publication. Not that you can tell from its website: As their latest print cover is on “AI”, then maybe it is only fitting that their website is stuffed […]
Read More… from Using once-legitimate sites to host SEO spam
It was about time I had a look at the occidental search engines again, using a site:jackyan.com search to see how they fared. The previous test for this site was in May 2023. I knew Google was still terrible, and I knew Bing had improved since the days of having 10 results for the domain. […]
Read More… from Testing occidental search engines on site: again: Mojeek, Bing more normal
The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]
Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward
After four months, we received another notice from Copytrack—it must be our 14th. As usual, I went back through our digital files and sent them our licence info. But this time, I got rather fed up, since we’ve successfully proved our position 100 per cent of the time, and I think we should be whitelisted. […]
Read More… from Copyright trolling: another fishy mob to block
A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa? Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]
Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you
Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]
We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which […]
Read More… from I have business for the photo bots, but they don’t want it
Proof once again that your Mastodon data are not portable. New Mastodon.social users apparently sent out a lot of spam. I never saw any—the only one I received was from Mastodon.uk overnight—and this morning I found myself cut off mid-conversation with a friend on Mastodon.nz as the admins there made the decision to suspend its […]
Read More… from The way I define data, they’re still not portable on Mastodon