ttj - Tom Jones

Observe: This is from trying to do a basic web search under google.com.  I am asked to solve a captcha, selecting all images with cars.  This is a first for me, for a web search under google.com, and indicates new lows.  I thought google's main product was advertising for search.  They should be keen, then, to deliver search results under any circumstances.  But apparently, they are not.

The search was simply for "time": 16:34 is correct.  But look at "People also ask" "What is the time over there in England now?".  It gives the time in several English places as Fri 5:30pm (btw today is Thursday), and promises "200 more rows". It looks like the crawler just took this snapshot, on a Friday at 17:30.  The thing about the time, though, is that a snapshot of it is not useful.  If you are going to do it, do it properly.  Or -- don't. The decline of Google's main service's quality may be related to its recent transformation into a vast bureaucracy, summarised by Scott Locklin recently in his article " Calling a bureaucrat by its name " [1] . [1] < https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/calling-a-bureaucrat-by-its-name/ > Most likely, the people responsible for the 5:30pms can't be located.  And to remove their output from the front page for search "time"? It's fascinating to watch go...

Around 2000, everyone realised they no longer had to go between Altavista, Excite, Yahoo Search.  Google gave good search results, fast, and wasn't bogged down by shitware. Today, in 2023, the quality of Google's answers-inline results is poor. In the above example, google declines to answer the query in the units I asked for.  Maybe kmph is a funny way of putting it.  Doesn't matter. Is anyone bothering trying to improve on it? To take a much more general obvious low-hanging fruit: the search results don't link properly to the web pages in the search results. The thing displayed on the page starts off like a URL, but isn't one.  That's the quasiURL "https://www.rmets.org > metmatters > beaufort-wind-scale" The actual link, which I just got with my browser's "Copy link" function is: "https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwj6-5iazIKDAxVlUqQEHQ_dCi0...

 Am now getting blank pages from Google Calendar: Um, how do I put a border around that screenshot?  It's white. Anyhow, Google Calendar now giving blank pages shortly after giving 500s < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2023/09/google-is-giving-more-and-more-500.html > Time to move away from Google Calendar and other services, but also, are there desktop calendar clients that actually keep their own data and sync, more like smartphone calendar apps, so you aren't reliant on a live web site for desktop calendar?

Having recently read Booker's "The Neophiliacs", which has as its backdrop a succession of British prime ministers from the 50s and 60s, I googled something like "Churchill Eden Home", to see which one I was missing.  The right information to return is something like: Macmillan, and by the way the it's Douglas-Home not just Home.  Instead, it returned a load of I don't know what: U wot m8 ?

I've switched my default search engine to duckduckgo.  It's simply better at finding web pages than google, despite its stupid name. Google search has become increasingly "curated", to the point where they're pushing whatever they want at you, and not really searching the web based on what you entered.  Only a few sad souls in google branch offices still believe in the neutral algorithm bullshit. This blog still isn't listed on Google, despite being authored and hosted on their platform, and me explicitly requesting it via search console.  Meanwhile, duckduckgo found it via a link, and it's just there. Google has been heading this direction for a while, and accelerating downwards, to the point where most interesting stuff on the web has disappeared again.  In other words, the google experience has regressed to whatever people were using in 1999, before Google came along.  

 For years, google search results have consisted of links not to the result pages, but to google-based redirects. This seems like a strange choice by google.  They break all kinds of things, including the user getting the URL of a linked page from their browser.  I want to do this all the time.  One workaround is to follow the link, and then copy it from the address bar instead. If they put the correct URL for the link target, and added a bit of javascript to notify them for tracking when followed, this would work in over 99% of cases.  What extra are they gaining, that justifies breaking the copy-link-location feature, that is a basic way of how the web works (or could work)? Instead, they seem to have added javascript to incorrectly and deceptively display the right URL in the user's status bar, despite the real link pointing at google's own servers. In this example, the status bar is spoofed to say something under www.heathrowmedical.com, but the real target ...