The newer the tech, the slower the site

10.04.2023/14.00

So far I’ve had two people feed back about the site redesign and it’s positive. One friend in the US noticed that the site ran slower for him than before, which is very astute of him: he’s absolutely right because it seems the newer the tech, the slower things go. Bit like banking. I’ve had […]

Of course Google’s fine with running cloud services for known pirates

06.04.2023/05.21

The content’s ours, but that URL isn’t—and thanks to Google they’re still online A Chinese gambling site has cloned entire chunks of Lucire’s website. It’s not the first time this has happened with a bad actor behind the Bamboo Curtain; some years ago I had to ask a friend from Wuhan to intervene to […]

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

05.04.2023/11.34

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 […]

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

27.03.2023/02.46

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 […]

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

26.03.2023/12.16

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 […]

Got dynamic pages or a Wordpress blog? Don’t expect Google to rank your pages highly

25.03.2023/11.45

That was short-lived. Bing’s back to offering 55 results for Lucire, and when you go through them, c. 40 per cent are repeated from page to page. However, a lot of the results are from the 2020s now, of both static and dynamic pages, so that’s something. There’s still a handful of truly ancient pages […]

Bing is coming back to life

12.03.2023/10.38

In quite an unexpected about-turn, Bing began spidering Lucire’s website again, and not just the old stuff. A site:lucire.com search actually has pages from after 2009 now, and while 42 per cent of results still get repeated from page to page, there are actually pages from the 2010s and the 2020s. There are still a […]

The IBM Selectric version of Univers revived

/02.12

This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt. A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]

Another example of Google’s antiquity when it comes to search results

06.03.2023/01.59

Is Google now the Wayback Machine, too? Since I haven’t used Google regularly since 2010, I can’t do what’s called a longitudinal study, though when I started examining search engine results for Lucire after Bing tanked last year, nothing in my Google searches jumped out at me—till earlier in 2023. I guess wherever Bing goes, […]

Cory Doctorow might be predicting the end of the web as we know it

21.02.2023/11.40

Two great pieces by Cory Doctorow came my way today on Mastodon. The first is an incredibly well argued piece about why people leave social networks. Facebook and Twitter won’t be immune, just as MySpace and Bebo weren’t. One highlight: As people and businesses started to switch away from the social media giants, inverse network […]