Continuing the disinformation battle—because we have to

The disinformation continues, this time on Quora. Here this person defends the indefensible by … agreeing with me? They claimed later to have deleted the post, but that was a lie. The post remains, but my comment has been deleted. They can’t handle someone pointing out their deceptive conduct.     There were a couple […]

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Testing the occidental search engines with site:, June 2024 edition

I haven’t run one of these tests for a while (for eight months), to track how the occidental search engines were doing with the claimed number of pages for a cross-section of websites. Mojeek and, last time I checked, Bing were actually truthful about these numbers. Bing had missed the mark on this for some […]

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Praising the small web

Jon Henshaw shared his ‘Small matters’ post recently, and it makes for good reading. One highlight: While the Small Web still exists, most people spend increasingly more time on the Big Web [sites controlled by mega-corporations], and that’s a problem because the walled gardens and algorithms keep us from seeing and experiencing the many extraordinary […]

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Has Bing’s image search tanked?

Maybe I have very rotten timing but out of curiosity, I tried out the Duck Duck Go image search tonight for something that I thought would yield a lot of results.     You know I wouldn’t give Google praise freely, but to its credit:     I thought: maybe DDG had problems with its […]

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Testing occidental search engines on site: again: Mojeek, Bing more normal

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. […]

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The logical consequence of Semrush and its users’ misinformation: personal attacks

  This is the natural consequence of all the misinformation that Semrush encouraged its users to post through the crap generated by its Keyword Magic Tool: people attacking me on Reddit. And who can blame them? It could well look like I was behind this spam campaign, instead of being the victim. The deleted comment […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

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 […]

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LLMs and Google could destroy the internet

Leigh Harrison sent me this blog post by Evan Boehs, which reflects my earlier ones about the web being rendered useless by Google et al. I never intended this blog to be about tech, but there’s so much to chart, and so much dishonesty to get on the record, lest someone else finds themselves in […]

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Online reviews: no safeguard against piling

There is a certain satisfaction in reading statuses like this:     But at the same time it confirms what I said years ago about Google My Business and its ilk. There are no safeguards for piling. Thanks to Google’s bugs, I believe my business has a listing but it’s been nicely messed up so […]

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“AI” is drivel

This is from Perplexity, showing how convincingly these bots with their large language models spit out utter drivel:     And not everyone will have the actual knowledge to call them out on it:     “AI” is only useful when you already know the answer, because it does get it wrong and you need […]

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