Manu Schwendener/Unsplash I like what Robin Sloan had to say in his blog post, ‘A Year of New Avenues’. It’s typeset in Filosofia, which is another great reason to read it. I’ve often said the trends of a new decade, or century, don’t emerge on the dot. You’ve got to get a few years […]
Tag: World Wide Web
On the verge of a change for the better
I can’t find the original toot on Mastodon but I was led to this piece in the MIT Technology Review by Chris Stokel-Walker, ‘Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks’. As I’ve cut back on my Twitter usage, I haven’t witnessed any issues, but it does highlight the efforts […]
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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Time to get New York involved
Still nothing from the Spanish outpost of Hearst or from Red Points Solution SL on their false accusation against Lucire, so tonight I contacted one of the Hearst VPs in New York—as they’ll more likely understand where we’re coming from. Whenever there’s been a copyright matter, Americans tend to respond quickly, faster than Europeans or […]
Bing has tanked
Well, folks, here’s someone who’s done the maths. The stats in the last post suggested as much but the sample was so small. Maurice de Kunder at WorldWideWebSize.com has a definitive graph: His methodology is explained at his site. I’d say late May or early June was when I noticed Duck Duck Go […]
Putting the search engines through their paces
One more, and I might give the subject a rest. Here I test the search engines for the term Lucire. This paints quite a different picture. Lucire is an established site, dating from 1997, indexed by all major search engines from the start. The word did not exist online till the site began. It does […]
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How to end social media censorship
Kristina Flour/Unsplash This Twitter thread by Yishan Wong is one of the most interesting I’ve come across. Not because it’s about Elon Musk (who he begins with), but because it’s about the history of the web, censorship, and the reality of running a social platform. Here are some highlights (emphases in the original): There […]
Contextual targeting worked, so why abandon it?
Didn’t I already say this? Contextual targeting worked for so long on the web, although for some time I’ve noticed ads not displaying on sites where I’ve blocked trackers or had third-party cookies turned off. That means there are ad networks that would rather do their clients, publishers and themselves out of income […]
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Searching for Murray Smith
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that […]
Search engines favour novelty over accuracy and merit
I was chatting to another Tweeter recently about the Ford I-Max, and decided I’d have a hunt for its brochure online. After all, this car was in production from 2007 to 2009, the World Wide Web was around, so surely it wouldn’t be hard to find something on it? I found one image, at […]
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