Besides, isn't Kagi based around a meta-search for Google and Bing? I tried it out, did a site: search for one of our sites, and the results were identical to what those two brought up. I know this since Google brings up framesets that we haven't used since the 2000s in the top 10, and guess what? So does Kagi. Plus a bunch of weird results that only Bing was finding.
Hi Mike, you probably know that when I first alerted you to this in January 2023 I had been running site: searches for half a year. We have a site the same age as Techdirt where usually between 10 and 55 of the thousands of pages we actually have show up on Bing, and this has happened since last year. (Of those 55, 40 per cent of the results on the pages after the first are repeats.) The day you wrote your last article on this topic, we “recovered” to 1,700—but soon we were back to single digits. That 1,700 day was pretty good as it meant we were getting close to The New York Times, which Bing shows has 5,000 pages. Talk about the big time. (For a laugh, try running site:microsoft.com. Google and Mojeek have more pages than Bing’s 195,000.)
I’ve gone through all the hoops that Microsoft people and their support helpers suggest for nought, and it’s clear to me that something inside Bing is very dead—and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve observed a big tech site fail in a big way. WorldWideWebSize.com shows Bing's index has collapsed, too, at least when Bing doesn't lie about the number of results it has for any given search. Alltheweb and Inktomi probably had bigger indices than Bing does today.
You mention competition for Google. There is Mojeek, which shows c. 47,000 results for site:techdirt.com. It’s the biggest index I know in the occident outside of Google. It was because of Bing’s failure that I began hunting, and I haven’t been disappointed with Mojeek’s site: search results. We use them for our site's search function now.
After publishing our story, guess what? Red Points issued another DMCA notice to remove that—they really don’t like getting negative press, and this is all they know how to do.
Basically they claim Hearst also owns the story we published attacking them. If Hearst really did hire them, why would they post a story attacking their own contractor?! Talk about providing evidence of perjury!
After publishing our story, guess what? Red Points issued another DMCA notice to remove that—they really don’t like getting negative press, and this is all they know how to do.
Basically they claim Hearst also owns the story we published attacking them. If Hearst really did hire them, why would they post a story attacking their own contractor?! Talk about providing evidence of perjury!
The trouble is Google doesn’t seem to need any proof of the original source. We’ve just had four notices covering seven URLs. Five of those URLs have exclusively our own content. Two of them are our own work with licensed content that doesn't even belong to the complainant.
But of course Google sees ‘Hearst’ (their Spanish outpost anyway) and believes the BS. The saga so far is here. In this case it’s a company called Red Points Solution SL, and from what I can tell, its processes do not work. You might even call them fraudulent. Google takes six days to act on your counter-notice, then allows the bogus complainant another 10 working days to do what they have to do. Till then, you’re libelled by Google when they say that results have been removed—making you look like a copyright infringer. Guilty till proved innocent.
We get these regularly, too?although I admit I got duped by the first one. Usually, the ones we get are those that say they are doing us a favour. The craziest one was a web developer asking us to remove a link from our directory?obviously this SEO ?expert? decided that the best way to rid themselves of these links was to spam anyone with one, including legitimate sites. So to remove spam, they engaged in spam. Nice one.
To the commenter above: Google really doesn?t like hearing it?s messed up. So it makes the questions near impossible to answer. I understand about seven people in the US have autobiographical memory?they?re likely to be the only people who can tell them what month and year they started their Google accounts.
After the above incident, I deleted all my Blogger blogs. I was on FTP publishing myself, but after seeing what Vincent went through, I decided that Google could not be trusted. To this day, Google still claims I have one blog left but won?t show me what it is (it?s not on my dashboard). Rick Klau?s successor proved to be far less on the ball, and one of the support guys claims it?s a blog that I have no connection with at all.
Well, I got caught up in this one today. No proxies. No malware. No automated queries. Just a regular Joe doing some searches typed by hand, staying within the rules?only to have this message come up: ?We're sorry... / ... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.?
Second time in two years that Google has accused me of doing something that I didn?t do, and last time, we prevailed after six months, thanks to Techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091228/1803277526.shtml).
Dear Mike: thank you for writing up what I had gone through over the last six months.
Rick Klau at Google has indeed fixed things for us and we had a private discussion on why the case was borderline.
I wish we had come across someone like Rick earlier. Only yesterday, I had a discussion with a mutual friend who identifies him as one of the good guys inside Google. The courteous and efficient way we were finally dealt with confirms that. His 24-hour turnaround, from my email to the restoration, is to be commended.
However, I am still rather miffed at what I had been through on the forums, which was frustrating. My ‘Christmas panto’ blog post was directed mostly at that experience, because I still found the procedure obstructive. The last post in the Google support thread was HTML code from the Yahoo! cache (in response to Chuck pasting the frameset code [!])—which was strangely deleted within a day. It was as though he, or someone on the forums, did not want to see that proof.
For my own (former) Blogger blogs, I had opted for FTP publishing, which I would recommend—and have done so for Vincent.
I am glad to note that there is one rule for everyone—provided you can get someone like Rick Klau who can make a judgement on whether the complainant is legit or not. Go through those forums, as I have, and there are a lot of sploggers crying foul over deletion, and those guys do not deserve to get their blogs restored. I’m guessing Rick checked me out, and saw that I had a pretty decent and honest record of blogging—and knew that he wasn’t dealing with a splogger.
On the forums, though, could Chuck have not done the same thing?
Thanks to Techdirt, there’s now a proper record of these incidents, and Rick has kindly offered his contact details—which hopefully can be a remedy to others who have had to fight for such a long period. At the end of the day, something good came of this for other legit bloggers.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Jack Yan.
Mojeek
By design, Mojeek requires a keyword. I guess Bing now does, too, but neglected to tell anyone?
Kagi
Besides, isn't Kagi based around a meta-search for Google and Bing? I tried it out, did a site: search for one of our sites, and the results were identical to what those two brought up. I know this since Google brings up framesets that we haven't used since the 2000s in the top 10, and guess what? So does Kagi. Plus a bunch of weird results that only Bing was finding.
Predictable
Hi Mike, you probably know that when I first alerted you to this in January 2023 I had been running site: searches for half a year. We have a site the same age as Techdirt where usually between 10 and 55 of the thousands of pages we actually have show up on Bing, and this has happened since last year. (Of those 55, 40 per cent of the results on the pages after the first are repeats.) The day you wrote your last article on this topic, we “recovered” to 1,700—but soon we were back to single digits. That 1,700 day was pretty good as it meant we were getting close to The New York Times, which Bing shows has 5,000 pages. Talk about the big time. (For a laugh, try running site:microsoft.com. Google and Mojeek have more pages than Bing’s 195,000.) I’ve gone through all the hoops that Microsoft people and their support helpers suggest for nought, and it’s clear to me that something inside Bing is very dead—and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve observed a big tech site fail in a big way. WorldWideWebSize.com shows Bing's index has collapsed, too, at least when Bing doesn't lie about the number of results it has for any given search. Alltheweb and Inktomi probably had bigger indices than Bing does today. You mention competition for Google. There is Mojeek, which shows c. 47,000 results for site:techdirt.com. It’s the biggest index I know in the occident outside of Google. It was because of Bing’s failure that I began hunting, and I haven’t been disappointed with Mojeek’s site: search results. We use them for our site's search function now.
Red Points Solution SL can’t handle a free press
After publishing our story, guess what? Red Points issued another DMCA notice to remove that—they really don’t like getting negative press, and this is all they know how to do. Basically they claim Hearst also owns the story we published attacking them. If Hearst really did hire them, why would they post a story attacking their own contractor?! Talk about providing evidence of perjury!
Red Points Solution SL can’t handle a free press
After publishing our story, guess what? Red Points issued another DMCA notice to remove that—they really don’t like getting negative press, and this is all they know how to do. Basically they claim Hearst also owns the story we published attacking them. If Hearst really did hire them, why would they post a story attacking their own contractor?! Talk about providing evidence of perjury!
Tip of the iceberg
The trouble is Google doesn’t seem to need any proof of the original source. We’ve just had four notices covering seven URLs. Five of those URLs have exclusively our own content. Two of them are our own work with licensed content that doesn't even belong to the complainant. But of course Google sees ‘Hearst’ (their Spanish outpost anyway) and believes the BS. The saga so far is here. In this case it’s a company called Red Points Solution SL, and from what I can tell, its processes do not work. You might even call them fraudulent. Google takes six days to act on your counter-notice, then allows the bogus complainant another 10 working days to do what they have to do. Till then, you’re libelled by Google when they say that results have been removed—making you look like a copyright infringer. Guilty till proved innocent.
Spam to remove spam
We get these regularly, too?although I admit I got duped by the first one. Usually, the ones we get are those that say they are doing us a favour. The craziest one was a web developer asking us to remove a link from our directory?obviously this SEO ?expert? decided that the best way to rid themselves of these links was to spam anyone with one, including legitimate sites. So to remove spam, they engaged in spam. Nice one.
Password reset
To the commenter above: Google really doesn?t like hearing it?s messed up. So it makes the questions near impossible to answer. I understand about seven people in the US have autobiographical memory?they?re likely to be the only people who can tell them what month and year they started their Google accounts.
After the above incident, I deleted all my Blogger blogs. I was on FTP publishing myself, but after seeing what Vincent went through, I decided that Google could not be trusted. To this day, Google still claims I have one blog left but won?t show me what it is (it?s not on my dashboard). Rick Klau?s successor proved to be far less on the ball, and one of the support guys claims it?s a blog that I have no connection with at all.
Blogger remains a total mess. Avoid at all costs.
Five years on, nothing has changed
Well, I got caught up in this one today. No proxies. No malware. No automated queries. Just a regular Joe doing some searches typed by hand, staying within the rules?only to have this message come up: ?We're sorry... / ... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.?
Second time in two years that Google has accused me of doing something that I didn?t do, and last time, we prevailed after six months, thanks to Techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091228/1803277526.shtml).
Back again
And it’s reappeared. Seems to be a bit of a cycle. Rick Klau is on to it though, which is a relief.
Gone again
Oh, well, the feeling of success was short-lived. The blog has disappeared again.
Restored
Dear Mike: thank you for writing up what I had gone through over the last six months.
Rick Klau at Google has indeed fixed things for us and we had a private discussion on why the case was borderline.
I wish we had come across someone like Rick earlier. Only yesterday, I had a discussion with a mutual friend who identifies him as one of the good guys inside Google. The courteous and efficient way we were finally dealt with confirms that. His 24-hour turnaround, from my email to the restoration, is to be commended.
However, I am still rather miffed at what I had been through on the forums, which was frustrating. My ‘Christmas panto’ blog post was directed mostly at that experience, because I still found the procedure obstructive. The last post in the Google support thread was HTML code from the Yahoo! cache (in response to Chuck pasting the frameset code [!])—which was strangely deleted within a day. It was as though he, or someone on the forums, did not want to see that proof.
For my own (former) Blogger blogs, I had opted for FTP publishing, which I would recommend—and have done so for Vincent.
I am glad to note that there is one rule for everyone—provided you can get someone like Rick Klau who can make a judgement on whether the complainant is legit or not. Go through those forums, as I have, and there are a lot of sploggers crying foul over deletion, and those guys do not deserve to get their blogs restored. I’m guessing Rick checked me out, and saw that I had a pretty decent and honest record of blogging—and knew that he wasn’t dealing with a splogger.
On the forums, though, could Chuck have not done the same thing?
Thanks to Techdirt, there’s now a proper record of these incidents, and Rick has kindly offered his contact details—which hopefully can be a remedy to others who have had to fight for such a long period. At the end of the day, something good came of this for other legit bloggers.