How to ensure people won’t read your page

05.10.2025/22.21

Creative Commons/CC0/Pxhere Anyone else do this? You’re searching for something online and you go to a page where there’s an introduction, then a ‘Contents’ box dividing up the answer into sections. You immediately leave that page because it’s likely to be “AI”-written or the answer you want is buried within, and it’s quicker to […]

Google lies (situation normal), Google users run scrapers, Tencent users attack

25.09.2025/09.43

Big Tech lies. Each time I use Google, I get this: The message, ‘Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it’s really you sending the requests, and not a robot’ is a sham. The reality is that Google will force a captcha on you […]

The future of search—and it’s not “AI”

22.08.2025/10.01

Shufei had a great idea in conversation on Mastodon: Eventually soon the disinformation will be so thick that vetting for truth on the internet will become practically impossible. Industrialized libel by LLM will front data protection rackets: pay a fee to get your name clear from lies of varying severity. I don’t see a way […]

Running site: searches for four of our sites across four engines

03.06.2025/11.38

Google is hiding the number of results for any given search. Google hid this under ‘Tools’ some time ago but now that link no longer works universally. I was able to access it using a vulnerable browser that let everything through, and for this blog, at least, the count is surprisingly poor. Google is so […]

The “AI”-free joints are the places to hang out (where everybody knows your name)

22.05.2025/05.01

Nice to get some link love from Mashable, though unfortunately Wordpress didn’t pick it up. I only knew because 13 spun splogs, including “AI”-translated ones, picked it up and linked us, and my blog had a queue of track-back requests. Chris Taylor’s ‘Welcome to Google AI Mode! Everything is fine’, with the sub-lede ‘Wait a […]

Testing the occidental search engines with site:—Bing most improved

14.05.2025/10.41

Having seen the number of results for Autocade drop on Mojeek—something which they said was unlikely—I thought it was about time I ran another series of site: tests, using our random cross-section. And I have to report that for some sites, the drop is real. I can’t speak for whether the others have actually removed […]

Substantial drop in site: results at Mojeek; is Ecosia now Google?

01.05.2025/10.39

I’m told by Mojeek that this should not happen but it has. In October 2023, it had 3,103 results for a site: search for the original Autocade website, beating Google at 2,910 and Bing at 2,170. Mojeek is meant to build on its index but earlier this year, it dropped into the 700s. Currently site:autocade.net […]

How the search engines fared with a new site

06.04.2025/11.04

As Autocade World is a relatively new site, it has been interesting to see how some of the search engines have fared. It is a Wordpress site, which experience tells me presents a set of issues when it comes to search. Mojeek: barely anything. Four links to date, though an interesting mix of the home […]

Testing the search engines: quickest to index, more site: searches

03.02.2025/09.10

Who was the quickest at indexing any part of Autocade World? January 17: Google—probably because I had obtained an SSL certificate January 21: Internet Archive, because of ‘certificate transparency’ [January 30: First public mention by me on Facebook to get our members off there] January 31: Bing February 2: Mojeek Yandex, Baidu, Brave […]

January 2025 site: tests on occidental search engines: Bing recovers

27.01.2025/03.47

After running my latest round of search engine site: tests, I think we can safely say that Bing has recovered in terms of its index size, and it’s no longer down where Alltheweb was in 2002. It actually has tens of millions of results for Microsoft’s own domain, and not a few lakh. This is, […]