Hereâs a site Iâve always liked: Techdirt. Itâs incredibly influential, and reports on the technology sector. Mike Masnickâs run it for the same length of time as Iâve run Lucire (25 years, and counting).
And when it comes to Bingâs index collapseâor whatever you wish to call itâitâs no more pronounced than here (well, at least among the sites that even get listed). For site:techdirt.com:
One. This is a site that dates back to the 1990s and churns out numerous articles daily, and thatâs how bad Bingâs got. Naturally, itâs the same with all the Bing clones, like Yahoo (the one with no logo now), Ecosia, Qwant, Neeva, Duck Duck Go, etc. Unlike Baidu, Bing doesn’t have communist Chinese censorship as an excuse. Or does it?
If you ever needed proof something was really, really off at Redmond, this is it. And still the clones stay silent.
PS.: If you search for Techdirt on Bing, its home page does not even come up in the top 10.
P.PS.: Here’s what WorldWideWebSize.com has to report (thanks to nf3xn for posting it first on their Mastodon). I believe the site is wrong when it calculates that the total index was up as high as it is on the left of the graph: basically it takes what Bing claims is the number of results as the truth, and we know it lies.
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, e.g.:
Anyone alive during this period will be wondering, ‘Where’s Altavista?’ Just on visitor numbers, as opposed to visits per month, they were doing 19 million daily in 1996, 80 million daily in 1997. Goodness knows how many searches we were doing per day. Yet they are nowhere to be seen on this animation till December 1997, with 7 million monthly visits. If you were anything like me, you were using Altavista countless times a dayâeven conservatively, say you went on four times daily, and you were one of the 80 million per day, you would be putting Altavista at 9,600 million visits per month, dwarfing AOL and Yahoo. By 1997â8, we weren’t using directories like Yahoo for search, we were using these newfangled search engines. Google only overtook Altavista in 2001 in searches.
And I am old-fashioned enough to think this channel should be called Data Are Beautiful, not Data Is Beautiful.
I’d love to know the sources: not only could I remember clearly Altavista’s position (and Alexa had them in number one as well), it took me no time at all to confirm my suspicions through a web search.
Above: A re-created Altavista home page from 1999.
Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.
I came across NewTumbl (formally newTumbl) a few days ago, after finding my Tumblr feed just wasnât what it used to be. Itâs not that the dirty pictures are goneâI only ever followed one blog where the images might be considered sensualâbut that the energy was. Those friends whose posts interested me werenât posting much any more, and it wasnât just them: my posting had diminished significantly. Platforms, I imagine, have a shelf life, and when announcements such as Verizonâs last year, which became known, perhaps incorrectly, as Tumblrâs âporn banâ, it was bound to affect the platform. It was the language that opened Verizon up to ridicule: apparently, they had a problem with âfemale-presenting nipplesâ, and some innocent content was flagged for removal.
What Verizon had really underestimated was that among the adult imagery were communities that were having free and safe discussions about sexuality, and sex workers themselves had a place where they, too, could post. It wasnât an âadultâ site per se, considering the overwhelming majority of the content was family-friendly. That perhaps kept the place relatively safe: you could have these private discussions while coming across general posts featuring interesting photography or good political viewpoints. Tumblr also hadnât descended into the political divisiveness that plague platforms such as Twitter.
I liked Tumblr for many reasons. It became a fun place to post interesting graphics for me, and to put anything that I didnât want to structure into long-form thoughts. It was image-based. Every now and then I would put up a quotation. The Font Police blog is still there, with over 20,000 followers.
I liked the fact that for years, someone would get back to you when you posted a query. This was true even after Yahoo acquired it.
But during the Blogcozy experiment, which sadly resulted in that platformâs closure, I cut down my time on Tumblr, because I had found a more suitable place to put those brief thoughts and to share with friends. Had Tumblr been a greater draw, I wouldnât have considered it. After Blogcozy closed, I didnât really resume my Tumblring to the same extent. Social seemed to be dying, since it was being run by Big Tech firms that lied as their main position. Even if Tumblr was more honest (and it was), the age of social media seemed to be at an end.
I may have been wrong, because since posting on NewTumbl Iâve been impressed by the sense of energy there. Yes, it has attracted a great deal of the adult posters who left Tumblr. But if you donât want to see X-rated stuff, you say so in the settings, and adjust to M (for mature), O (for office), or even F (for family). You won’t see anything coarser than what you chose (with the occasional exception when posters did not have a clue how the ratings’ system works). The interface is familiar-but-different-enough for Tumblr users and Verizon lawyers. Yet it goes beyond what Tumblr does, with the smart use of Interstate as the body typeface, and photos in multi-image posts actually appear in the order you load them.
Itâs not perfect: I couldnât link a video but I could upload; and I managed to stumble on a 404 page by following links, both of which Iâll report, since they make it so easy to do.
But hereâs the really good thing: the transparency. One of the main developers, Dean, talks to users and provides feedback. Heâll even post when an error occurs during developmentâthatâs something youâll never see Facebook do when its databases die.
He and I have already exchanged notes via DMs after I joined for two days, and I said I saw so many parallels between what he was doing and what I saw with Tesla when Martin Eberhard was running it (transparency over ego), or even in the days when Jerry and David were building YahooâIâm old enough to have been submitting sites to them while they were still being run out of a garage. Thereâs an exciting sense with Dean and the small NewTumbl crew that theyâre building something useful for the world, celebrating free speech and humanity. Am I being overly optimistic? I donât think I am: I enjoy the UI, I like the openness and honesty, and these are just what the tech sector needs. I see a draw for spending my time here even though I have zero followers to my blog. The buzz feels similar to when I discovered some sites back in the 1990s: it seems new and exciting.
Itâs also rather nice being the first person to populate some fandom hashtags, though I was second for Doctor Who, and for anyone ever searching for The Avengers, they will see, rightly, a photograph of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
Iâll see you there at jackyan.newtumbl.com. Lucire also has a NewTumbl at lucire.newtumbl.com.
Above: The one thing I posted to Tumblr that went viral, in 2011.
I’m getting a buzz seeing how little I update social media now. Around February 2016 I began updating Tumblr far less; I’ve gone from dozens of posts per month to four in December 2017 and seven in January 2018. (Here’s my Tumblr archive.) Facebook, as many of you know, is a thing of the past for me (as far as my personal wall is concerned), though that was helped along by Facebook itself. However, I’m still a pretty heavy Instagram user, and I continue to Tweetâthough with Twitter’s analytics telling you how much you’re up or down over the previous month, it might be a challenge to see if I can get that down by 100 per cent next. (It won’t happen any time soon, but if Twitter continues on its current path over its policies, it might come sooner rather than later.)
I’m wondering if the next badge of honour is how much you can de-socialize yourself, and for those of us with web presences (such as this blog), bringing traffic to your own spaces. Why? It’s all about credibility and authenticity. And I’m not sure if the fleeting nature of social media provides them, at least not for me.
Now in an age where so many are trying to be an “influencer”, then wouldn’t we expect the tide to turn against the shallow, fleeting posters in favour of something deeper and more considered? After all, marketing seeks authenticityâit has for a long time. What is authentic about a social media influencer who changes clothes multiple times a day out of obligation to sponsors? Even if they reach millions, did it really connect with audiences on a deeper level or did it simply seem forced?
I can understand how, initially, social media were real connectors, allowing people to connect one on one and have a conversation. It seemed logical that marketing would head that way, going from one-to-many, to something more personalized, then (as Stefan Engeseth has posited for a long time) to one where brand and audience were on the same side, trying to find shared values (let’s call it ‘oneness’). At a time social media looked like it would help things along. But has it really? Influencers are less interested in being on the same side than being on the other side, in an adaptation of the one-to-many model. It’s just that that model itself has become democratized, so a single person has the means of reaching millions without a traditional intermediary (e.g. the media). There’s nothing really wrong with that, as long as we see it for what it is: a communications’ channel. Nothing new there.
Some are doing it right in pursuing oneness with their audiences by posting just on a single topic, updating honestly about their everyday livesâmy good friend Summer Rayne Oakes comes to mind with her Homestead Brooklyn account, and has stayed on-message with what she stands for and her message for over a decade. Within the world of Instagram, this is a “deeper” level, sharing values in an effort to connect and be on the same side as her audience. However, she isn’t solely using Instagram; other media back her up. Hers is a fantastic example of how to market and influence in the context I’m describing, so there is still a point to these social media services. But for every Summer Rayne there are many, many who are gathering attention for no values that I can fathomâit has all been about the numbers of followers and looking attractive.
I haven’t a problem with their choiceâit is their space, after allâbut we shouldn’t pretend that these are media that have allowed more authentic conversations to take place. Marketers should know this. These messages aren’t customized or personalized. Algorithms will rank them so audiences get a positive hit that their own preferences are being validated, just like any internet medium that places us in bubbles. The authenticity is relative: because no party has come between the communicator and the audience, then it’s unfiltered, and in that respect it’s first-hand versus second-hand. But how many times was that message rehearsed? How many photos were taken before that one was selected? It’s “unreality”.
There are so many such social media presences now, and crowded media are not places where people can have a decent connection with audiences. Some with millions of usersâI’m thinking of young modelsâmight not even be reaching the target audience that companies expected of them. Is what they wear really going to be relevant to someone of the opposite sex browsing for eye candy? That isn’t a genuine conversation.
Don’t look to my Instagram for any clues, eitherâI use it for leisure and not for marketing. I don’t have the ambition of being a social media influencer: I’m happy with what I do have to get my viewpoints across.
And I don’t know what’s next. I see social media decentralizing and people taking charge of their privacy more, even if most people are happy to have the authorities snoop on their conversations. Mastodon has been pretty good so far, because it hasn’t attracted everyone. The few who are there are having respectful conversations, even if posts aren’t reaching the numbers they might on Twitter, and mutual respect can lead to authenticity. If, as a marketer, that’s not what you seek, that’s fine: there are plenty of accounts operating on audience numbers but not genuine conversationsâas long as you know what you’re getting into. But I believe marketing, and in particular branding, should form real relationships and dialogue. Not every life is the fantasy shown in social mediaâwe know that that’s not possible. One politician has coined the term ‘fake news’; and social media have “fake lives”, in amongst all the bots.
If these media become known for shallow connections “by the numbers”, then even those doing it right, forming those genuine conversations, may be compelled to move on, or at least value the social media services less because of what their brands stand for. Email is a great medium still, and you can still have great conversations on it, but email marketing isn’t as “sexy” as it was in the mid-1990s, because there’s more spam than legit messages. It takes skill to use it well and to build up a proper, consented email list. Social media are getting to a point where some big-number accounts are associated with shallowness, and the companies themselves (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) have policies and conduct that have the potential to taint our own brands.
In 2018, as at any other time, doing something well takes hard work. There is no magic medium.
Iâve a bit more reason to moan about Google of late, after a few more dodgy happenings on the site.
But before I do, some good news: I found a very good search engine. And itâs not Bing.
Ironically, one of the alternatives to Google search that I liked was Yahoo!, but even that company now has switched to Bing. However, it still has some search tools that others can tap in to.
From what I know, Duck Duck Go (or, to use the siteâs own convention, DuckDuckGo) takes some of those data and supplements its own. Itâs surprisingly comprehensive and accurateâsomething I could not call Cuil, which once saw itself as a Google-killer.
I got a similar feeling in 1998 when I ïŹrst saw Google. âWow, this is much better than AltaVista!â Now with Google doing more evil, Duck Duck Go is a breath of fresh air. None of that âsupplemental indexâ BS, either. It also promises that it wonât store your private information. That, too, feels revolutionary in 2010.
I liked Google better, too, when it just delivered good services, and didnât bother with who I am or tried to pretend it was a social network.
Hereâs the real kicker: the founder of Duck Duck Go, Gabriel Weinberg, emailed me after I sent in a compliment. I remember when either Jerry or David did that back in 1994 or thereabouts on Yahoo!. Youâll be lucky to get that now.
I donât know what that says to you, but I would have thought that that meant I would never get Buzz.
Wrong.
What part of ensuring that my name could not be found did Google not understand? What other US laws has it violated this time?
Itâs pretty rich for a company that did not have, the last time I looked, a privacy policy for Buzz.
So, I went and deleted my profile again. This time, it did kill Buzz, though I still have 777 connections in my Social Search. How does it know, if I am no longer supplying data for that?
I also really donât want to know the 285 friends-of-friendsâ searching habits and Tweets. (It still insists I have four blogs with themâthe actual number is zero. I wouldnât trust Google to be able to do arithmetic correctly.)
But hereâs one big down side to not having a Google profile. Google suggests you can be contacted through the company by not signing up to a profile with them! In your Google account, there is now this:
You are now a member of something that hasnât even been invented yet! This is probably how, after all, it got all those Buzz users earlier this year. Google has âpre-consentâ!
Clicking on âNew Serviceâ results in a 404. I donât know what game Google is playing, but something is rotten in Mountain View.
I can moan all I want, but I have acted and have drafted a letter asking Google to remove the unwanted services from my account. I would delete the whole account, but for a couple of services where colleagues have asked me to set things up (notably Analytics for the Medinge Group websiteâcontrary to Googleâs own claims, I cannot remove myself as an administrator).
So why whinge? Hopefully itâll have you checking your own Google accounts to make sure there arenât unwanted things there.
Some weeks ago, as we neared this milestone, I planned to write a small blog post on reaching 1,100 cars at the Autocade site. And to show that these milestones are not rigged, we wound up with a fairly ghastly motor at that 1,100 mark.
My Wired for March 2010 arrived today (things take a while to reach the antipodes), with the most interesting article being on the Google algorithm. And hold on, this isnât a Google-bashing blog entry. Steven Levyâs article was probably written before the furore over the Google Buzz privacy flap. And it points out how Google has learned from users for search, producing more relevant results than its competitors. With 65 per cent of the search market (and close to 100 per cent of my searches for many years), it has a bigger pool to learn from, too.
Recently I have noticed in ego-searches that Google is now smart enough to distinguish between searches for yours truly and those for Jack Yan & Associates (both in quotes), so that the former results in a mere 53,800 references, and the latter with 124,000 (quite a bit down from yesterday, when I first hatched the idea about blogging this topic). That is smart in itself: knowing when people are looking for me (or my blog) and when they seek the company. By comparison, Yahoo! lists 280,000 for the former and 42,500 for the latter, as the latter is (if you look at terms alone) a more specific search.
Once upon a timeâeven as late as 2009âa search for my name would result in both my personal and work sites.
Iâm pretty proud of my company and the people who work with me, and in election year, if someone were checking out my background, I sure would not mind them getting to JY&A as well. On the other hand, thanks to this distinction, my mayoral campaign site comes up in the top 10 in a search for my name. Either way, itâs relevant to a searcherâso all is well.
But is this really how people search? If I were searching for, say, Heidi Klum, I would probably want (I write this before I even attempt a search) her bio, a bit of news, pictures to ogle, and Heidi Klum GmbH, her company. This is exactly what Google delivers, with her Wikipedia entry in addition (as the first result). (Bing does this, too; Yahoo! puts Heidi Klum GmbH at number one.) Maybe someone could get back to me on their expectations for a name search although, as I said, Google is doing me a huge political favour by distinguishing me from my business. The ability to distinguish the two is, by all accounts, clever. Levy cites an example in his article about mike siwek lawyer mi which, when fed into Google at the time of his writing, gets a page about a Michigan lawyer called Mike Siwek. On Bing, âthe first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, thereâs no direct referral to Siwek.â (A Bing search today still does not have Mr Siwek appear early on; in fact, most now discuss Levyâs article; sadly for Mr Siwek, the same now applies on Google, with the first actual reference to his name being the 18th result. Cuil, incidentally, returns nothingâso much for supposedly having a Google-busting index size.)
But I have one that is puzzling to me. Ten years ago, Lucire published an article about the 10th anniversary of the Elle Macpherson Intimates range. One would think that the query “Elle Macpherson Intimates” “10th anniversary” would bring this up firstâin fact, I did have to search for the URL last year when writing a blog post. On Google, this is, in fact, the last entry. On Bing, it is the first. On Yahoo!, it is second.
Of course, Google may well have judged the Lucire article to be too old and that the overwhelming majority of searches is for current or recent information. And being 10 years old, I hardly imagine there to be too many links to it any more. However, I thought the fact that we can now, very easily, sort our searches by dateâespecially with the new layout of the resultsâ pageâit might just give us the most precise result. The lead page to the article is in frames (yes, itâs that old), which may have been penalized by Google. But many of the leading results that turn up that have these two terms do not have them with great proximity (in fact, numbers one and two do not even have the term Elle Macpherson Intimates any more). However, I donât think the page I hunted for should be last, especially as none of the preceding entries even have the words in their title.
I am not complaining about the Google situation since a 2009 Lucire article that links to the old Elle Macpherson one comes up in the top 10, so itâs still reasonably easy to get to via the top search engine. (Cuil lists the 2009 article from Lucire in its top 10, too.) Thereâs also a blog entry from me that links it, and that appears on the second page.
Itâs just that I hold a belief that many people who search using Google (or any search engine) do so for research. They want to know about Brand X and, sometimes, about its history. If I type a personâs name, there is a fairly good chance I want to know the latest. But when I qualify that name with something that puts it in the past (anniversary), then Iâd say I want something historical. That includes old pages.
While few rely on a fashion magazine for historical research (though, believe me, we get queries from scholars who want citations of things they saw in Lucire), Google results nos. 1 through 53 and the majority of Cuilâs results (which are very irrelevantâthe first two are of a domain that no longer exists and a blank page) donât hit the spot.
For the overwhelming majority of searchesâwell over 90 per centâGoogle serves me just fine, which is why you donât see me complain much about the quality of its results. Even here, itâs not so much a complaint, but professional curiosity. It would be sad for Bing or Yahoo! to be labelled as search engines for historical searches, but someone should fairly provide access to the older, yet still relevant, pages on the internet for everyday queries (so I donât mean the Internet Archive).
PS.: Thereâs one more search engine that should be considered. Gigablast, which I have used on and off over the years, does not list the 2000 article, either. Like Google, the 2009 one is listed, and only five results are returned.âJY
