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Added on 4 Jul 2013. Last read 8 minutes ago.

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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 796):

    • 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 […]

    • Battle
      • There was a Tweet recently along the lines of, ‘Dear media, stop characterizing a death from cancer as a “battle”.’ If I deciphered their Tweet correctly, their rationale was that it can’t be won, so using such a term is somehow (politically?) incorrect. I call BS. My mother characterized her fight as a battle. And […]

    • 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. […]

    • Attempting re-entry into Bing’s Pubhub
      • In early July, I wanted to see if we could add Lucire to Bing as a news source in their Pubhub—after all, Google has us as one, as Yahoo, Altavista and Excite had back in the day. And I’d say that 25 years of publishing with an international team might qualify us as being media. […]

    • Rising popularity on Autocade
      • Ever since we had to reset the counter for Autocade in March, because of a new server and a new version of Mediawiki, it’s been interesting to see which pages are most popular. The old ranking took into account everything from March 2008 to March 2022. With everything set to zero again, I can now […]

    • Farewell, Sergei Mitrofanov
      • Farewell, my dear friend Sergei. Taken far too soon.   Sergei trying to corral us for a photograph in London in 2015.   I’m pretty upset by this so rather than write a fresh tribute (which I will have to do in time in an official capacity), I’m going to quote from what I wrote […]

    • Laying out French articles in HTML takes a long time
      • Above: Some French text in Lucire.   Regular Lucire readers will have seen a number of articles run in English and French (and one in Japanese) on our main website. Typographically, the French ones are tricky, since we have to distinguish between non-breaking spaces and non-breaking thin spaces, and as far as I know, there […]

    • 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 […]

    • When the oldest looks the freshest
      •   Here are three Elle covers that I uploaded to last month’s gallery, from 1991, 2007 and 2022. Which looks the most modern? To me, it’s the 1991 US one. The Futura Light type is calm, it all looks rather balanced, and the photograph is well lit and composed. From memory, it was commended by […]

    • We’ve reached 4,600 models on Autocade
      •   We’ve hit 4,600 models on Autocade, with the Toyota Will VS taking us to this point, but the stats show we are sitting on 1,180,548 views. We have to get to 1,352,989 on the new count before I can announce we’ve reached 29 million page views. We’re looking at the lowest traffic on Autocade […]

    • August 2022 gallery
      • Here are August 2022’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.  

    • 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 […]

    • More signs of Bing’s tiny index
      • Because I have OCD, one more round of stats. It’s not just us: Bing seems to have a reduced index for everyone. Here are a handful of sites that I fed in at random for site: searches. The only site where it beats Mojeek in indexed pages is, you guessed it, Microsoft’s. I guess since […]

    • 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 term did not exist online till the site began, though it […]

    • Not alone in discovering Bing is broken
      • MIA again on Bing: Lucire’s home page. The alt tags are not missing, with perhaps some exceptions for small logos. And not having an H1 tag is not fatal to other pages of ours that have been indexed. It remains bizarre.   After Holly Jahangiri’s very useful feedback to my previous post, I thought I’d […]

    • A new video for the home page
      • Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October. It dawned on me that despite being on YouTube, this really needs to be on the home page of this website, […]

    • Bing is definitely very broken
      • The last few days have been about ‘How awesome is Mojeek?’ and ‘How shit is Bing?’ I’m finding great search results from Mojeek, and as a site search for Lucire, it’s absolutely brilliant. Blows Duck Duck Go (Bing with privacy) away, even back when DDG had a reasonably comprehensive index of our pages (before the […]

    • Rand Fishkin’s ‘Something is Rotten in Online Advertising’
      • I’ve been meaning to link Rand Fishkin’s ‘Something is Rotten in Online Advertising’ for some time, so here it is. He writes, in his second and third paragraphs (links in original): Where to even begin… Should we start with the upcoming loss of third-party cookies? The bizarre Google & Facebook duopoly teamup against anti-trust action? The rise […]

    • Half an hour is a long time in politics
      • Hat tip to Johnnie Moore for this one, on Twitter earlier today. Half an hour is a long time in politics pic.twitter.com/AAIgPFhdw8 — The Secret Barrister (@BarristerSecret) July 20, 2022

    • Forget Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Google—I’m trying Mojeek
      • It was disappointing to note that after switching to HTTPS, and signing on to Bing Webmaster Tools, the search engine results for those sites of ours that made the change are still severely compromised. I’ve written about searches for my own name earlier, where my personal and company sites lost their first and second positions […]

    • If corporate America says it, it’s probably untrue
      • Le dernier.   I see the Le Snak range has now left us, after its US owner PepsiCo cited a lack of demand. I call bullshit, since during 2021 it was becoming increasingly difficult to find them on the shelves. Throttling distribution is not the same as a lack of demand, something you see time […]

    • Kissing that Disqus advertising money goodbye (webmasters beware)
      • I’m going to have to write off what Disqus owes us. No response to this thread, and no response to a DM I sent at their request. Please DM us your account name and site shortname and we will be happy to look into this for you. — DisqusSupport (@DisqusSupport) July 8, 2022 I assume […]

    • I’m not the Jack Yan running for mayor of Toronto
      •   As far as coincidences go, this was unexpected. To readers from Toronto, and anyone else emailing me, I’m not the guy running for mayor there. I realize I’m way more likely to come up in searches for my name and for my name with mayor or mayoral candidate, since my namesake doesn’t appear to […]

    • The next lot to be removed: Disqus
      •   Years ago, we removed the Facebook widgets from Lucire’s pages. Last year, there were Instagram’s and Twitter’s turns, after each of those platforms locked us out (though later we regained access, and in Twitter’s case we issued a veiled threat to their lawyers). Last night, it was Disqus’s turn as we removed the commenting […]

    • De-Googling didn’t start in 2013
      • Usual funny stuff from Wikipedia, this time on de-Googling.     If they’re Wikipedia’s “first”, then I beat the lot of them, and I wasn’t even the first to use this term. From 2010:     There’s a whole series of posts from 2010 where I deal with this—surely it was obvious to anyone in […]

    • Facebook saves private medical information despite saying it gets scrubbed
      • As embedding from Mastodon is not working tonight, I’ll copy and paste Per Axbom’s post: Nice bit of reporting from Swedish Radio. They built an online fake pharmacy and activated Facebook advertising tools. Thousands of simulated visits to the pharmacy were made each day, and the reporters could see all the sensitive, personal information being […]

    • July 2022 gallery
      • Here are July 2022’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.  

    • The very simple Maramataka and Chinese lunar calendar conversion table
      • When I first started commemorating Matariki a few years ago, I had figured out, since both ancient Māori and Chinese worked out the lunar calendar, that it was roughly five lunar months after ours. I was also told that it marked the Māori New Year. Maybe it’s due to local iwi, but my recollection was […]

    • My notes from RNZ’s The Panel, Wednesday, June 22
      • I write notes for my appearances on RNZ’s The Panel, and while I don’t read them verbatim, they are useful for copying and pasting into this blog afterwards. (Anyone who has ever attended a conference where I’ve spoken might find this familiar: I’ll upload the notes but they aren’t a word-for-word reflection of what I […]

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