Carry on designing

Journeys through time are fascinating. Earlier this week, I looked at some of the websites we liked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section. In many cases, it was a trip down memory lane, as some sites still had their 2000s layouts. Sadly, this could mean that a few of them will disappear in […]

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More disinformation sploggers point to Semrush

More disinformation sploggers have owned up and blamed Semrush, not that they are taking their posts down. The latest: Hope you are doing well. First of all we are extremely sorry for using the keyword related to your name. We only use this as a keyword. According to the semrush this keyword has potential of […]

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Online history lesson

  It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is […]

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Which medium makes us happy, where we absorb and we share?

Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost […]

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Fake news fuelling riots? The warnings were there as bots industrialize disinformation

For anyone who has followed my battles with bot-written and bot-based junk this year, this should come as no surprise:     The UK riots were fuelled by the same kind of website, with the same raison d’être. This one was in Pakistan, where, sadly, some of the disinformation sites about me have come from. […]

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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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