I’m afraid this says it all, and I mean it. We know Facebook is pay-to-play and Google is definitely heading in that direction. For some searches (try looking for a career coach), it arrived there a long time ago. In case Mastodon embeds go awry in the future, here is what I wrote: […]
Read More… from Google is warning us that they are pay-to-play
Once again, Google is full of bollocks. Its latest email to me says there’s a video on the Lucire website that’s ‘too tall’. Here’s a screenshot of the offending video on the page it identified. I checked the embed code, and the width is set to 300, the height to 169. […]
Read More… from Google can’t deal with YouTube code; and a farewell to Smugmug after 13 years
You didn’t imagine it: Google’s search is worse, and that’s by design, according to a document produced in discovery. Dr Jonny L. Saunders of UCLA shared one on their Mastodon earlier today. The internal Google email, from Jerry Dischler to Anil Sabharwal, dated May 3, 2019, expresses a concern over the company missing […]
Read More… from Google search is worse by design—internal memo
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? […]
This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]
Read More… from Google News continues bias against independent media
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 […]
When I first started working, there was a profession called corporate identity. It wasn’t called branding. I noticed the vernacular change in the 1990s, more so in the early 2000s when even Wally Olins started using it more to describe what Wolff Olins did. You just have to follow the market. We’re at a point […]
Google is still getting things wrong when it comes to showing the results from this site. More PHP pages are showing (up from 1!), but looking through the top 10, it might as well still be 2013, showing pages that haven’t been linked for a decade or more. And its latest problem seems to be […]
Read More… from Google now might show blank pages high up in a site: search
I took a peek at Google Webmaster Tools. Apparently there are a lot of noindex pages on the Lucire website that they want me to resolve. Well, folks, if you didn’t put tag index pages so high up for a site: search, I wouldn’t need to have so many. This is to help Google […]
Read More… from Curiosities within Google’s search console (formerly Webmaster Tools)
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 […]
Read More… from How Google fares in a site: search if your site is all PHP—Wordpress users beware