LLMs and Google could destroy the internet

15.04.2024/02.54

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 […]

Semrush allegedly glitched, misinformation followed

05.04.2024/01.34

A number of people did the right thing when they learned about the misinformation with my name in connection with Google and SEO. Urbanitek was one. They clarified who I was, and noted, ‘While his credentials are impressive, it’s noteworthy that Google rarely associates updates with specific individuals in their SEO guides. Google hasn’t officially […]

My real expert opinion on Google, SEO, and the mess that’s to come (not the LLM junk)

24.02.2024/01.50

Skry being right on the money: Still those web pages about me being a Google SEO expert or having an algorithm named for me are being indexed and prioritized by Google, all because Semrush hallucinated (or was there a malicious hand in this?), told a bunch of people (in south Asia, predominantly) about […]

Google fails to downrank junk sites; Bing and Mojeek fare better

12.02.2024/05.26

Understandably, I was bemused but then frustrated with the fake articles out there about the new Google algorithm update being created by me and named for me. (Even Perplexity has picked up this misinformation.) Of all those I found and reached out to, only one author—Shahid Jafar—had the decency to remove his article and apologize. […]

Tech musings from a non-tech: search engines and the nightmare of AWS

03.02.2024/01.23

A great quote from Penn Jillette in Cracked: Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and […]

The curious case of Google’s SEO searchers

03.01.2024/11.16

They may no longer be relevant, but most (all?) of our sites still have meta keyword tags. When we redevelop a site, we tend to take the header tags in full from the previous incarnation, so unlike the old joke about George Washington’s axe (‘This is the original. I’ve only had the handle and blade […]

When anti-capitalists love billionaires

29.11.2023/12.20

Ka wehi ta ratou kaupapa here, ko hiahia kōrero te reo Māori ahau. People are waking up to how bad Google has become, if posts on Mastodon are any indication. What’s disappointing are the replies, usually saying they have switched to Duck Duck Go because it’s so much better, and others saying Kagi is […]

Google can’t even find a specific name properly

23.11.2023/11.10

My apologies to the late screenwriter Murray Smith’s family for using him as an example for this search engine analysis, but it proves a point of how useless Google is. Apart from the Companies’ Office in the UK, there’s very little recorded about Murray by his legal name. This blog is one of the few […]

As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social

03.11.2023/01.59

My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]

Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update

01.11.2023/11.10

It has been a long time since I looked at how the three main occidental search engines—Mojeek, Google and Bing—were performing with a site: search and whether they could pick up dynamic pages. As I did in April, I’m trying it with site:lucire.com, which has both static and dynamic content. Mojeek is fairly consistent, but […]