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 […]
Read More… from It’s not just us: Google fares poorly for site: search for Quartz
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 […]
Read More… from Got dynamic pages or a Wordpress blog? Don’t expect Google to rank your pages highly
The Hon Debbie Ngarewa-Packer MP was right when she questioned our government’s decision to ban Tiktok from parliamentary devices. If it’s about foreigners getting hold of data, then why not ban Facebook and Instagram? Last I looked, Tiktok had not, unlike Facebook, been party to any genocides. Parliamentary Services says at least Meta is American […]
Read More… from If you take out Tiktok, then why not Meta, too?
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 […]
This is one of the more fascinating type design stories I’ve come across in ages. Jens Kutilek has revived a very unlikely typeface: the IBM Selectric version of Univers in 11 pt. A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even […]
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Of course some of us expected Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to be rubbish—and we knew ChatGPT would make stuff up. Because Bing makes stuff up. If you have a normal, functioning web crawler (or spider), there’s no way you would ever wind up with pages that have never existed. Nothing about this is […]
Read More… from Of course Bing AI makes stuff up—Bing itself does
This may be wise, or it may not be. I thought netizens would want to know if a page was ancient, and since Google keeps putting really old stuff that hasn’t been linked for nearly 20 years into the top 10 for a site:lucire.com search, I may as well let readers know what they’re going […]
Read More… from Being transparent: you might as well know what you’re going to click on
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 […]
I had a chuckle at Marissa Mayer saying that Google results are worse because the web is worse. As I’ve shown with a site:lucire.com search, which is a good one since our site pre-dates Google (just), Google is less capable of providing the relevant pages for a typical search. I know how web spiders work […]
When you’ve been saying the emperor has no clothes for the last few months—and on the emperor’s forums—I shouldn’t be surprised we are at this point now. Bing is virtually dead, and they don’t want me probing Bing Webmaster Tools (which are largely useless) about my own sites to show up even more of their […]
Read More… from The emperor has no clothes, so Microsoft does what little it can do