I know how web spiders work in theory, and thereâs no way that 2002 framesets are coming up in a 2023 crawl. We havenât linked to those pages for a long, long time. But Google is throwing those into the top 10.
And we can extend this argument: Google, through its advertising, incentivized the creation of the very crap polluting the web.
Mayer said, âI think because thereâs a lot of economic incentive for misinformation, for clicks, for purchases.
âThereâs a lot more fraud on the web today than there was 20 years ago.â
Whatâs the bet that these fraudulent pages are carrying Google ads?
As Don Marti, who knows a lot more about this than I do, said to me: âIt’s all about moving traffic and ads away from sites that people want, and that advertisers want to sponsor, to places where Google gets a bigger % of the ad money (even if they’re on the sketchy side)â.
I think all this was foreseeable, and one could prove negligence on Google’s part. I still remember a time when established publishers like me wouldnât join Googleâs ad programmes because they were seen as an advertising service for second-rate (or worse) sites. They would appear on places like Blogger, which Google wound up buying.
Then the buggers wound up monopolizing the area, and things got worse for digital publishers as the ad rates got lower and lowerâand, as Don notes, the money can find its way to the bottom feeders.
As if to prove my point about lies, Google spammed me right after my last post. In its footer:
No, I didnât. I logged into Google to see my settings. Sure enough:
As I always say, when it comes to computers, Iâm right, theyâre wrong. I have a better memory.
I unsubscribed:
But Iâm not signed up to âNews and tipsâ. Not on any menu. Remember, Google? What’s the point of managing my preferences when you don’t know how to use them?
Basically, theyâll spam you when they want regardless of what your settings are.
Strange, a reply I wrote in agreement has vanished.
Basically my earlier point was that Google has also destroyed a lot of legitimate publicationsâ earnings through depressing ad prices, diverting income to splogs, content mills and spun sites. Not to mention taking a decent cut for itself.
The whole enterprise is a massive con.
From a legal POV I would even say it was all foreseeable and a negligence lawsuit waiting for someone to take it on. It would be great to close it down.
The original reply linked to this post, which is also saying the emperor has no clothesâexcept this time it’s applied to Google. If Googlers are worried about that, then maybe I’ve cut very close to the chase. The one part which, when attacked, destroys the entire corrupt system.
PS.: Don Marti expresses my point far better than I did.
Search engine Mojeek is doing no wrong in my book. Hereâs its CEO Colin Hayhurst being interviewed by The New Eraâs Jeffrey Peel, making complete sense, which is not something I can say about anyone speaking for Big Tech. We should be shunning monopolists if we truly value progress and innovation, or even a proper, factual debate. We even have laws about it that few seem to wish to enforce when it comes to Big Tech players. Itâs well worth a watch.
I was disappointed to see that the Warehouse, our big retailer, specifically blocks Mojeek from searching its site. Google is fine. Explanations varyâbut they include the theory that the Warehouse wants to get data from its users and Google can provide them.
Iâve written to the Warehouse as an account holder and received no reply. I decided to take it higher, to its chief digital officer, on October 3. As far as I know this email has been delivered, but thereâs always a possibility I have her address wrong. Regardless, I am yet to hear back on any front, including social media where I had asked the Warehouse why they would wish to block a legitimate and far more ethical search engine. What does it say about your company when you choose to do business with someone as questionable as Google, yet you go out of your way to block a fully ethical and privacy-respecting business?
Dear Sarah:
I contacted the Warehouse through the customer service channels at the beginning of September and have yet to hear back.
As CDO I think you’re the right person to raise this with, though please refer it to a colleague if you aren’t.
Our internal search is now run by Mojeek, a UK-based search engine that has the largest index in the west outside of Google. It is also my default, having lost faith in Duck Duck Go after 12 years.
Other than the Warehouse’s home page, none of the contents of your company’s site appear in Mojeek. When I raised this with them, they tell me that Mojeek is very specifically blocked by the Warehouse. Neither they nor I can see any good reason a legitimate, independent search engine would be blocked.
I am told that inside your code is:
User-agent: MojeekBot
Disallow: /
As concerns over privacy grow, it seems a disservice that it’s blocked.
When I put this to other techs, they theorize that the Warehouse wants to track people via whatever data Google provides. I find this hard to believe. To what end? The amount of information that comes surely can’t outweigh overall accessibility to the website for those of us who have concerns over Google’s monopolistic behaviour and privacy intrusions.
Even if tracking were the reason, I would have thought there would be no great loss allowing a tiny percentage of people to come in via a Mojeek search result and browse the siteâincluding customers like me who had the intent to see what you had in stock with a view to purchasing the item.
I genuinely hope this is something that will be looked into and that a New Zealand company I admire (one which is connected to me through a round-about wayâI was educated by relatives of the Tindalls) isn’t party to upholding the Google monopoly.
After reading Mojeekâs blog post from last July, I learned there are only seven search engines in the world now. In other words, I was checking more search engines out in the 1990s. Itâs rather depressing, especially as the search market is largely a monopoly with Google dominating it (and all the ills that brings), and Bing and its licensees (like Duck Duck Go) with their 6 per cent.
Knowing there are seven, I fed the site:lucire.com search into all of them to see where each stood.
The first figure is the claimed number of results, the second the actual number shown (without repeats removed, which Bing is guilty of).
I canât use Brave here as its site search is Bing as well.
Yandex appears to be capped at 250 and Mojeek at 1,000, but at least they arenât arbitrary like Google and Baidu. Baidu has a lot of category and tag pages from the Wordpress section of our site to bump up the numbers.
Frankly, more of us should go to Mojeek. It can only get better with a wider user base. Unlike Bing, it hasnât collapsed. I know most of you will keep going to Google, but I just donât like the look of those limits (not to mention the massive privacy issues).
Mojeek is now at 5,900 million pages, which must be the largest index in the west outside of Google.
Big Tech often says that if theyâre broken up, they wonât be able to compete with mainland China.
Folks, youâve already lost.
Why? Because youâre playing their game. You believe that through dominance and surveillance you can beat a country with four times more people.
The level playing field under which you were created has been disappearing because of you.
Youâre the ones acquiring start-ups and stifling the sort of innovation that you yourselves once created.
If the US believes it should create more tech champions, or more innovators, then Big Tech needs to get out of the way and let people start the next big thing.
But we know this isnât about China.
Itâs about them trying to preserve their dominance.
We all know theyâll even sell data to Chinese companies, and theyâre not too fussed if they have ties to the Communist Chinese state.
To heck with America. Or any western democracy. Their actions often underscore that.
Without the innovation that their enterprise system created, theyâll increasing play second fiddle in a game that mainland China has played for much longer.
I already said that Chinese apps have surpassed many western ones, based on my experience. Through a clever application of The Art of War.
And if the world stays static, if all everyone is doing is keeping the status quo in order to get rich, and innovation is minimized, then itâs going to look like a pretty decaying place, sort of like the alternative Hill Valley with Biff Tannen in charge. Just recycling the same old stuff with a whiff of novelty as a form of soma. Pretty soon that novelty turns into garishness as a few more moments are eked out of a decaying invention.
Whereâs the next big thing, the one thatâs going to have a net benefit for life on this planet?
Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haqueâs latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion.
Just an idea: letâs not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants to get more of a foothold in our country (and not pay tax here either). Because we have a tendency to kiss their arses sometimes. Just ask Kim Dotcom. Things like their legal precedents are still persuasive here, and with how different their priorities are, we need to place even less weight on them. Letâs not forget the rules we play by here, and that means whomever enters this market has to play by the same.
Speaking of daft decisions on the other side of the Pacific by dishonest parties who have got too big due to what amounts to lawlessness, Facebook has removed the requirement for users to answer questions when they join a public group. These questions were our way of safeguarding the one public group I still look after there, and over 99 per cent of users (no exaggeration; if anything, an underestimate) who attempted to join were bots. I define bots as including any legitimate account running bot software, which I thought was against Facebookâs T&Cs, but not in practice. I still report a lot of them, though unlike 2014 I wonât do them all. I just canât report thousands that I might see on a single visit.
I can imagine why Facebook has done this. This way Facebook hides the number of bots from group moderators (as if we hadnât known of their problems for the good part of a decade), and protects the bots as they continue their activity across the platform. This will encourage even more bots, and as I identified in an earlier post, I see more bots than humans these days on there (and Iâm not even a regular user).
I knew they were liars and shysters so I imagine this is in keeping with that. Cover up just how badly compromised the platform is by bots.
I havenât seen much on this change in Facebook group policy, but as changes go, this has to be the most anti-human, pro-bot move they have made in 17 years. No one ever demanded more rights for bots, but here’s Facebook giving it to them.
No point beating around the bush when it comes to yet another advertising network knocking on our door. This was a quick reply I just fired off, and I might as well put it on this blog so there’s another place I can copy it from, since I’m likely to call on it again and again. I’m sure we can’t be alone in online publishing to feel this way.
The original reply named the firms parenthetically in the last two scenarios but I’ve opted not to do that here. I have blogged about it, so a little hunt here will reveal who I’m talking about.
Thank you for reaching out and while I’ve no doubt you’re at a great company, we have a real problem adding any new ad network. The following pattern has played out over and over again in the last 25-plus years we have been online.
We add a network, so far so good.
The more networks we use, with their payment thresholds, the longer it takes for any one of them to reach the total, and the longer we wait for any money to come.
Add this to the fact we could get away with charging $75 CPM 25 years ago and only fractions of cents today, the thresholds take longer still to reach.
Other things usually happen as well:
We’re promised a high fill rate, even 100 per cent, and the reality is actually closer to 0 per cent and all we see are “filler” adsâif anything at all. Some just run blank units.
We wait so long for those thresholds to be reached that some of the networks actually close down in the interim and we never see our money!
In some cases, the networks change their own policies during the relationship and we get kicked off!
I think the problems behind all of this can be traced to Google, which has monopolized the space. It probably doesn’t help that we refuse to sign anything from Google as we have no desire to add to the coffers of a company that doesn’t pay its fair share of tax. Every email from Google Ad Manager is now rejected at server level.
If somehow [your firm] is different, I’d love to hear about you. The last two networks we added in 2019 and 2020, who assured us the pattern above would not play out, have again followed exactly the above scenario. We gave up on the one we added in 2019 and took them out of our rotation.
Hoping for good news in response.
I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works.
If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI
PS.: This was the image linked above, before I locked my account:
As youâll read in the thread, this has been confirmed by other Gmail users.
That should rule out ever using Gmail for secure communications. Not that you should be using a service like that for anything important, but the fact is Gmail has become ubiquitous, and I believe a lot of people donât know any better.
Just imagine being able to receive some emails meant for your rival by signing up to an address that varies from it by a full stop or period.
Secondly, we’ve noticed a large amount of spam where we can trace (via Spamcop) the origins back to Gmail. Oftentimes they have Gmail reply addresses, as in the case of 419 scams (where they may use another ISP or email service with a “sacrificial” address to send them). Why would you risk being among that lot?
There really is no reason to use Gmail. Youâll risk your emails going to someone else with a similar address, and youâll be among the company of unethical actors. I can truly say that if Gmail werenât this ubiquitous, and used by so many friends, Iâd just set up a rule on our server and block the lot.
