Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)

23.08.2023/10.18

Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the […]

Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’

16.08.2023/01.34

Rod Hilton, on how terrible Google is getting. This isn’t down to the web being worse, as Marissa Mayer laughably claims. This is down to Google focusing on its surveillance capitalism-based ad business, which earns most of its revenues, over search. It hasn’t been a search-centred company for decades. And I thought its […]

Techdirt’s down to zero results on Bing; meanwhile, Bing shows 1,760 for Lucire

27.07.2023/22.10

Hat tip to Leighelse on this one, when she alerted me on Mastodon. @DuckDuckGo @yegg Would either of you know, please, and is DDG in a position to help? Our search box is a DDG one (and has been for a long time) and seeing it come up empty constantly since March is disheartening. https://t.co/Wg8CoTq8cg […]

You can’t contract yourself out of breaking the law, Google—that’s not how it works

12.07.2023/12.12

Google has updated its privacy policy, giving itself carte blanche to take publicly available data to use for its large language models and “AI”. I don’t think whomever wrote the update has any comprehension of the law. Or that they do, but think they can get away with it. Maybe in their own country they […]

ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all

10.05.2023/00.49

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]

Bing Chat doesn’t pull from web page content—according to Bing Chat

25.04.2023/10.36

I had a bit of fun with Bing Chat last week, during which I got it to admit that when it searches the Bing index, it does not look at the content of the web pages. Bing Chat says it only has access to the snippet, URL and date. Of course, it lies, […]

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 […]

Of course Bing AI makes stuff up—Bing itself does

27.02.2023/04.12

Of course some of us expected Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to be rubbish—and we knew ChatGPT would make stuff up. Because Bing makes stuff up. If you have a normal, functioning web crawler (or spider), there’s no way you would ever wind up with pages that have never existed. Nothing about this is […]

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 […]