#searchengines — Public Fediverse posts

Ars Technica: Google complies with EU rules for travel searches, says the new results stink. “As the world’s largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. […]

Ars Technica: Google complies with EU rules for travel searches, says the new results stink. “As the world’s largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. […]

Ars Technica: Google complies with EU rules for travel searches, says the new results stink. “As the world’s largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. […]

Ars Technica: Google complies with EU rules for travel searches, says the new results stink. “As the world’s largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. […]

Ars Technica: Google complies with EU rules for travel searches, says the new results stink. “As the world’s largest search engine, Google is often a target of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to rein in Big Tech. The European Commission hit Google with a hefty 460 million euro ($543 million) fine in July for preferring its own services in searches for travel and shopping. […]

FYIVT: Vermont Just Got Its Own Search Engine — And It Reads the Documents Google Can’t. “The FYIVT Finder currently indexes more than 90,000 documents (and growing as you read this). That includes every Vermont bill dating back to 2010, searchable by subject rather than only by bill number. It includes more than 45,000 legislative committee documents — testimony, amendments, reports and […]

I posted this about a year ago. Might be a good time to repost it.

"Search With Stateful Chat" patent (Cf. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240289407A1/en ) - appears to describe the Gemini app for smartphones.

"Method for Text Ranking with Pairwise Ranking Prompting" (Cf. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250124067A1/en ) - documents an experimental process described in this research paper titled "Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting" (Cf. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.17563 ). There is no indication this was introduced into a live agentic system like Gemini.

"User Embedding Models for Personalization of Sequence Processing Models" (Cf. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2025102041A1/en ) - documents an experimental process for improving recommender (sub-)systems (like movie searches) that incorporate large language models. The process is described in this research paper titled "User Embedding Model for Personalized Language Prompting" (Cf. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.04858 ).

"Systems and methods for prompt-based query generation for diverse retrieval" (Cf. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2024064249A1/en ) - updates a 2022 patent for a process named PROMPTAGATOR that generates queries more efficiently based on a small number of examples, as described in this research paper titled "Promptagator - Few-shot Dense Retrieval from 8 Examples" (Cf. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.11755 ). This could be used to generate query fan-outs (but query fan-out has been used in multiple systems at least since the 1990s, so there are many implementations).

"Instruction Fine-Tuning Machine-Learned Models Using Intermediate Reasoning Steps" (Cf. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240256965A1/en ) - documents an older method for fine-tuning instructions submitted to LLMs, as described in this 2022 research paper titled "Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models" (Cf. https://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume25/23-0870/23-0870.pdf ). The work has been superseded by this paper titled "Mixture-of-Experts Meets Instruction Tuning: A Winning Combination for Large Language Models" (Cf. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.14705 ).

This is the AI Overviews patent, titled "Generative summaries for search results" (Cf. https://patents.google.com/patent/US11769017B1/en )

#google #aioverviews #aimode #machinelearning #search #searchengines #generativesearch #seo #searchengineoptimization #webmarketing #digitalmarketing #ai #patents

https://www.seo-theory.com/how-to-read-patents-for-seo/

No, informational content is NOT dead. The SEO industry is getting ridiculous with all this fear-mongering.

The outright hypocrisy from all these SEO Chicken Littles crying "the information Web is dead!" with their informational articles, videos, and long social media posts is the best clue about whom NOT to trust with your Web marketing.

#seo #searchengineoptimization #webmarketing #ai #search #searchengines #google #bing

University of Washington: GovScape lets you easily search millions of government documents. “At the end of every presidential term, the End of Term Web Archive preserves that administration’s web presence as a vast trove of documents and webpages. The archive began in 2008, with George W. Bush’s second term, and runs up to 2024, collecting images, text, graphs, redacted pages and other […]

How Important Is SEO in an AI-Powered Internet?

https://kierendaystudiosofficial.wordpress.com/2026/06/24/how-important-is-seo-in-an-ai-powered-internet/

Google didn't force Websites to load their pages with SEO bullshit.

The SEO community did that to the Web.

Yes, Google ranked the SEO bullshit, but it was always a choice in the first place on the part of Website publishers to accept that bullshit.

For all its faults, Wikipedia continues to outrank many of these sites without all the SEO fakery and flim-flammery.

So when I see people ranting about how Google "forced" all the crap onto the Web I just want to gag.

Google just took whatever you fools gave it and ranked it for you because if all you create is crap then all the search engine can do is index and rank the crap.

Don't blame Google for what YOU chose to do with your Web copy.

#seo #searchengineoptimization #webmarketing #digitalmarketing #google #search #searchengines

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/05/26/eu-nears-major-dma-fine-against-google-in-search-case-xcxwbn/

The EU is reportedly preparing a major Digital Markets Act fine against Google over search self-preferencing, with a decision expected before the summer break.

#Google #GoogleSearch #SearchEngines #EUDigitalMarketsAct #Antitrust #EuropeanCommission #EuropeanUnion #EURegulations

You cannot optimize for Information Gain.

You cannot optimize for Information Gain.

You cannot optimize for Information Gain.

Information gain = the difference between 2 probability distributions and any single Web document can be placed in thousands of different information gain computations PER DAY.

#seo #searchengineoptimization #searchengines #webmarketing #digitalmarketing

2 days away. You don't have to wait for the Webinar to make a donation and you can browse the library of other Webinars they've already hosted. There should be plenty of time for questions so come one, come all.

#seo #searchengineoptimization #searchengines #ai #webmarketing

https://www.seocharity.com/upcoming-live-streams

Suchmaschinen-Initiative will EU-Suche bauen | heise online https://www.heise.de/news/Suchmaschinen-Initiative-will-EU-Suche-bauen-11208441.html #DigitalSovereignty #SearchEngine #SearchEngines #Staan @ecosia @Qwant

More and more AI tools are abandoning the use of user-agents and honoring "robots.txt" directives. The age of voluntary restraint in site crawling is coming to a close.

#seo #analytics #bots #webmarketing #digitalmarketing #searchengineoptimization #searchengines #answerengins #ai

The Kagi search engine is in the zeitgeist. While we cooked dinner, I told Partner I was thinking of moving to Kagi and asked if he'd like to try it out with me. He demurred, saying he'd read about a different search engine he'd like to try, but he couldn't remember its name.

Comes back later with a link to an Ars Technica article. Turns out it was Kagi all along :p #kagisearch #searchengines

The more I dig into this "Google is stealing all the clicks" drama, the less inclined I am to side with all the SEO studies. The SEO community is notoriously unreliable in these kinds of analyses and so far they haven't raised the bar on their performance.

Before Google published its blog post explaining they're sending traffic to more Websites than previously, I had suggested as much to several people in the industry. Their immediate reactions were almost all the same: "NAH! Google is lying!"

Sorry, SEO community, but as usual you have no credibility when it comes to explaining what happens behind the curtains in Mountain View.

#seo #searchengineoptimization #analytics #webmarketing #digitalmarketing #searchengines #google

TechCrunch: Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech. “European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, which aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/08/08/techcrunch-qwant-and-ecosia-debut-staan-a-european-search-index-that-aims-to-take-on-big-tech/

Search Engine Land: Google bug cause reviews to drop out of local listings. “If you noticed that your local business listing on Google is showing fewer reviews, you are not alone. Since Friday, tons of reviews have been disappearing from the local listings within Google Search and Google Maps.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/02/11/search-engine-land-google-bug-cause-reviews-to-drop-out-of-local-listings/

added #marginalia and #wiby #SearchEngines to Awesome Search Engines repo:
https://github.com/davidshq/awesome-search-engines

#search #InformationRetrieval

At Last, Online Travel Planning Is Becoming (a Little) Easier - Airbnb, Google Travel and a few other platforms have tweaked their search engines, and th... - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/travel/online-travel-planning.html #travelandvacations #searchengines #expediainc #skyscanner #googleinc #research #airbnb