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 […]

Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play

19.11.2023/09.44

I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago. In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]

As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social

03.11.2023/01.59

My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]

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 […]

Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years

04.10.2023/10.44

Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’. Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified. I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]

Google search is worse by design—internal memo

30.09.2023/12.54

You didn’t imagine it: Google’s search is worse, and that’s by design, according to a document produced in discovery. Dr Jonny L. Saunders of UCLA shared one on their Mastodon earlier today. The internal Google email, from Jerry Dischler to Anil Sabharwal, dated May 3, 2019, expresses a concern over the company missing […]

‘Google.com is blocked’—good riddance

29.09.2023/10.54

This error message began creeping up this week: google.com is blocked google.com refused to connect. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE And appears with increasing frequency. Maybe Google is too poor to be able to serve everyone? I’ve noticed the search results worsen, as this blog’s covered. Is this the reason I can’t use it any more? […]