Forget the 2010s and 2020s, Bing’s results are firmly in the 2000s now

Immediately after blogging about Bing being able to pick up an article from 2022, Microsoft’s collapsing search engine has reverted back to being the Wayback Machine. There was just over a week of it living in the 2020s, but it seems it’s too much for them. It’s back to, well, Bing Vista, for want of […]

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Startpage isn’t what I thought it was—but then Google does the opposite to what you think

Startpage says it licenses Google’s results but gives us privacy. So, if you want Google-level, Google-biased results, but don’t want their tracking, you use Startpage. Um, no. Let’s just take a random search for a screenwriter I once mentioned on this blog:     It’s quite a bit slower than Google, too. The results are […]

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Testing the search engines: Bing likes antiquity; most favour HTML over PHP

Bing is spidering new pages, as long as they’re very, very old. Last week, we added a handful of Lucire pages from 1998 and 1999. An explanation is given here. And I’ve spotted at least two of those among Bing’s results when I do a site:lucire.com search. As a couple of newer pages have also […]

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Bing hates novelty—it’s really Microsoft’s Wayback Machine

Bing is still very clearly near death, as this latest site: search shows.     It manages a grand total of 10 pages from Lucire, and as outlined before, some are pages that have not been linked to for 17 years. I purposely updated some of the pages Bing had in its limited capacity, and […]

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Testing the seven search engines in the world

After reading Mojeek’s 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. It’s rather depressing, especially as the search market is largely a monopoly with Google dominating it (and all the ills that brings), […]

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False accusations from Red Points Solution SL

Yesterday, I returned to find a DMCA claim filed against us by Red Points Solution SL, purporting to act for Harper’s Bazaar España publisher Hearst Magazines SL, falsely accusing us of breaching their copyright with this article. You can read the notice here. Naturally, I filed a counter-claim because their accusation is baseless. Our source […]

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More of Bing’s follies (they just keep coming)

I see WorldWideWebSize.com has wised up and figured out Bing was having them on about the number of results it had for their search terms.     When Bing says it has 300-odd results for the site:lucire.com yet doesn’t actually go beyond a limit of around 50 (where it has been stuck for many months), […]

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Updating old pages since the experts are wrong

With all the odd results coming up in site searches—it’s not restricted to Bing—I attended to some of the older pages on our websites. Curiously, in a site:lucire.com search, even Google has our 2005 competition page up high, namely in fifth. There is only one link from our site internally to this page. I know […]

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What search engines show in their top 10 isn’t always relevant

The Bing collapse did lead me to look at some of the ancient pages on the Lucire site that the search engines were still very fond of. For instance, the ‘About’ page was still appearing up top, which is bizarre since we haven’t made any links to it for years—it reflected our history in 2004. […]

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Mojeek shows more in its search results than Google

This was something I had forgotten when doing the numbers on how many pages each search engine had indexed from our sites: what they claim to be their index size and what they let you access are two different things. And in Lucire’s case, Google, curiously, mostly does not allow access to our dynamic pages […]

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