Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry’s next big disrupter. It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans.

they get billions and billions and billions of searches every day and only about 15% of the searches that they've seen a given day. Our new that they've never seen before. So 85% of the searches that the world does on Google every day are things they've already seen.

But Google also uses optical character recognition to produce a second version, for its search engine to use, and this double process has some quirks. In a scriptorium lit by the sun, a scribe could mistakenly transcribe a “u” as an “n,” or vice versa. Curiously, the computer makes the same mistake. If you enter qualitas—an important term in medieval philosophy—into Google Book Search, you’ll find almost two thousand appearances. But if you enter “qnalitas” you’ll be rewarded with more than five hundred references that you wouldn’t necessarily have found.

Finding these kinds of sites can be tough, especially if you’re looking for authentic 1990s sites and not retro callbacks, since Google seems to refuse to show you pages from over 10 years ago.

So the proper unit for this kind of exploratory, semantic search is not the file, but rather something else, something I don't quite have a word for: a chunk or cluster of text, something close to those little quotes that I've assembled in DevonThink. If I have an eBook of Manual DeLanda's on my hard drive, and I search for "urban ecosystem" I don't want the software to tell me that an entire book is related to my query. I want the software to tell me that these five separate paragraphs from this book are relevant. Until the tools can break out those smaller units on their own, I'll still be assembling my research library by hand in DevonThink.

we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.

Sound copywriting should never be sacrificed to cater to Google’s current search methodologies because they can and will change.

the link operator was only designed to return a small sampling of backlinks to prevent SEOs from reverse engineering another site’s rankings

To find a sampling of links to any site, you can perform a Google search using the link: operator. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list a selection of the web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page

tesla AROUND(3) edison

Google now includes synonyms by default

Yes, it’s been deprecated. Why? Because too few people were using it to make it worth the time, money, and energy to maintain. In truth, although I sometimes disagree with the operator changes, I happen to agree with this one. Maintaining ALL of the synonyms takes real time and costs us real money. Supporting this operator also increases the complexity of the code base. By dropping support for it we can free up a bunch of resources that can be used for other, more globally powerful changes.

The <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> tag or directive applies to search engine crawlers. To block non-search crawlers, such as AdsBot-Google, you might need to add directives targeted to the specific crawler

For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.

Now, Google has to change its practices and prompt users to choose their own default search engine when setting up a European Android device that has the Google Search app built in. Not all countries will have the same options, however, as the choices included in Google’s new prompt all went to the highest bidders.As it turns out, DuckDuckGo must have bid more aggressively than other Google competitors, as it’s being offered as a choice across all countries in the EU.

This is why annotation matters.

Using information technology has become an important skill for students and employees. As a teacher wishing to use the Internet your options are typically to either provide students with specific links or have them “Google” to find information on the Internet. Using Google can yield interesting and unexpected results. Creating a list of specific links is time consuming and does not teach the students how to search the web.

(Remember when every news site published the piece, “What Time Is the Super Bowl?”)

As an index, people have different expectations on search result neutrality. Some want Google Search to be entirely neutral, some demand immediate action to remove some results. The European Union has both demanded GOOG to comply with removal requests, and fined GOOG for not being neutral in shopping queries. It is not beneficial for GOOG to assume the role of an impartial arbiter of content, since it’s not supporting their business model. Quite the contrary, they are under public scrutiny from multiple governments, potentially risking their reputation.

“a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”.