Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update

It has been a long time since I looked at how the three main occidental search engines—Mojeek, Google and Bing—were performing with a site: search and whether they could pick up dynamic pages. As I did in April, I’m trying it with site:lucire.com, which has both static and dynamic content. Mojeek is fairly consistent, but […]

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Bring back the human-curated web directory

Wayback Machine/Archive.org Nostalgia, with the Open Directory Project. This archived page from 1999 isn’t even the original. I still remember when it was called Gnuhoo in 1998.   Where have all the web directories gone? It seems we need them more than ever, since Google is so poor at ranking websites (while it funds the […]

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The state of play of the internet

From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon):     Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]

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NewTumbl is dead—the signs were there

On the 7th and 8th of this month, I had a couple of comments on an old post about NewTumbl, indicating to me that the site had shut down without warning. Members headed in to see this:     I left in 2020, though I accidentally told someone in a private email that it was […]

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A new website goes up—and Yandex beats them all

  Authentically You, a life and career coaching business in Wellington, New Zealand, has just launched. We’ve had a hand in the design and website development (where it had to be Wordpress and easy to manage), and it’s also been our task to get it on to the search engines. I was very surprised that […]

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Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no

This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it.     It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]

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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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Google now might show blank pages high up in a site: search

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 […]

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Why we’ve dropped Disqus, and the shenanigans of the online ad world

When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not? Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out. The trouble is those ads made so little […]

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This surely makes it blatantly obvious that Bing is near death

Here’s a site I’ve always liked: Techdirt. It’s incredibly influential, and reports on the technology sector. Mike Masnick’s run it for the same length of time as I’ve run Lucire (25 years, and counting). And when it comes to Bing’s index collapse—or whatever you wish to call it—it’s no more pronounced than here (well, at […]

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