Your preferences mean nothing to Google or Microsoft

I could just repeat my post from January 26. Let’s face it, Google is a notorious spammer, with a failing search engine, and an advertising business that’s a decent negligence lawsuit away from collapsing. It was 2011 when I showed everyone that your opt-out settings in Google Ads Preferences Manager were meaningless. Today, your email […]

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Google’s top 10 continue to bring up old pages; and it looks like Bing’s about to kick us off

After years of using the web, I think I know a little about how web spidering works. The web spider hits your home page (provided it knows about it), then proceeds to follow the links on it. Precedence is given to the pages within your site that are linked most, or are top-level: in Lucire’s […]

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Is Microsoft trying to stem its losses from Bing?

If Appledystopia is right in its 2020 article, Microsoft loses US$1·5 milliard per annum on Bing. So maybe that explains why it’s worsened so much. Microsoft might well be finding ways to cut its losses, and servers cost money. Pity that none of the Bing clones are saying anything, not even Duck Duck Go’s usually […]

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Now Google is worsening on a site: search: framesets from the early 2000s are in the top 10

This was never supposed to become a search engine blog, but like the Facebook “malware scanner” (or was that scammer?) and Google lying about its Ads Preferences Manager, I was forced to investigate when no one in the media (or, for that matter, the wider internet) did. And over the years, those posts really helped […]

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For most sites, Bing continues to shrink

The New York Times’ presence on Bing has plunged back to the thousands—it was 2,723 on August 2   Back in July, I ran site: searches on a small range of websites to see just how bad things had got with Bing. In January, I can report some have gone worse. And back in July […]

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The emperor has no clothes, so Microsoft does what little it can do

When you’ve been saying the emperor has no clothes for the last few months—and on the emperor’s forums—I shouldn’t be surprised we are at this point now. Bing is virtually dead, and they don’t want me probing Bing Webmaster Tools (which are largely useless) about my own sites to show up even more of their […]

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How the search engines fare on a site: search here

Time to do some analysis on the age of the search results for this site through the search engines. I’m curious about the drop in hits. ‘Contents’ pages’ also include static pages and, in Bing’s case, PDFs. (PS.: For clarification, a contents’ page would include a Wordpress tag page, or a page for a set […]

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Bing increases Techdirt’s results, saving it some embarrassment

After notifying Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, about my findings about Bing, coincidentally, the search engine began spidering his latest articles. It claimed to have 150 results, and delivered 92, many of which were repeated from page to page as usual. Tonight it’s a claimed 249, delivering 173. Techdirt is well respected and very […]

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This surely makes it blatantly obvious that Bing is near death

Here’s a site I’ve always liked: Techdirt. It’s incredibly influential, and reports on the technology sector. Mike Masnick’s run it for the same length of time as I’ve run Lucire (25 years, and counting). And when it comes to Bing’s index collapse—or whatever you wish to call it—it’s no more pronounced than here (well, at […]

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Avira dishonours paid subscription, blames it on the customer

I see Avira has downgraded me to their free version despite my being paid up. As far as I can tell, this has been the case for months, and I remember Tweeting them back when Twitter was a thing. I can’t log in at all, and it keeps showing a ‘Get Prime’ button to force […]

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