‘Google.com is blocked’—good riddance

This error message began creeping up this week:     google.com is blocked google.com refused to connect. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE   And appears with increasing frequency. Maybe Google is too poor to be able to serve everyone? I’ve noticed the search results worsen, as this blog’s covered. Is this the reason I can’t use it any more? […]

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Rod Hilton: ‘Google search is over’

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 […]

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Mojeek continues to refine its search results; Bing collapses again

Props to Mojeek again. I gave them feedback about how lucir was coming up for a search about Lucire. There is a search engine convention that identifies root words and delivers variants, but I argued that as I was querying a capitalized word, maybe Lucire should appear further up top. To their credit, this now […]

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How Mojeek, Google, Bing and Brave perform on a site: search here

Here’s an update on how three of the western search engines I’ve been watching are performing, with a site search here (site:jackyan.com). The traffic here is still well down on 2022, I believe caused by two main things: a worsening Google that is failing to pick up PHP pages; and the collapse of the Bing […]

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Mojeek v. Google v. Bing on a site: search—Google still largely failing to pick up PHP

After seeing how badly Google performed with site:jackyan.com, I wanted to get on record how it was with Lucire. I already knew it failed to pick up many PHP pages, preferring the static ones of HTML, but I didn’t realize just how bad it got. I’m pretty sure it’s worse now than even two weeks […]

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It’s not just us: Google fares poorly for site: search for Quartz

Not all of you will have caught the postscript to yesterday’s post. I wanted to see if Google was doing as bad a job with other Wordpress-only websites, and one of the most famous is Quartz. Sure enough, it was. Of the top 50 for site:qz.com, 33 pages were author, tag or category pages (let’s […]

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How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware

After the last post, you may be thinking: surely if my site was entirely PHP, Google wouldn’t have a problem identifying which were the most important articles? They are the biggest search engine in the world and all that data would ensure that they knew how to rank the dynamic pages properly. They would have […]

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Got dynamic pages or a Wordpress blog? Don’t expect Google to rank your pages highly

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 […]

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Bing is coming back to life

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 […]

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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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