#searchengines — Public Fediverse posts

Search Engine Roundtable: Google: Verifying Your Request To Continue To Search Results. “In early August, Google was testing requiring searchers to sign in to verify they are humans to continue to see search results. Now, Google is testing a similar feature without requiring you to sign in, but instead, Google is asking you to click a ‘Continue’ button after a few seconds, after Google verifies […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google: Verifying Your Request To Continue To Search Results. “In early August, Google was testing requiring searchers to sign in to verify they are humans to continue to see search results. Now, Google is testing a similar feature without requiring you to sign in, but instead, Google is asking you to click a ‘Continue’ button after a few seconds, after Google verifies […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google: Verifying Your Request To Continue To Search Results. “In early August, Google was testing requiring searchers to sign in to verify they are humans to continue to see search results. Now, Google is testing a similar feature without requiring you to sign in, but instead, Google is asking you to click a ‘Continue’ button after a few seconds, after Google verifies […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google: Verifying Your Request To Continue To Search Results. “In early August, Google was testing requiring searchers to sign in to verify they are humans to continue to see search results. Now, Google is testing a similar feature without requiring you to sign in, but instead, Google is asking you to click a ‘Continue’ button after a few seconds, after Google verifies […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google: Verifying Your Request To Continue To Search Results. “In early August, Google was testing requiring searchers to sign in to verify they are humans to continue to see search results. Now, Google is testing a similar feature without requiring you to sign in, but instead, Google is asking you to click a ‘Continue’ button after a few seconds, after Google verifies […]

"If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.

They just choose not to.

They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.

Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
(...)
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.

Google has become a scammer's paradise.

Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

#Google #Search #SearchEngines #AI #AISearch #Scams #AIOverview #BigTech #Monopolies #Antitrust

Calishat: Local News America Gets Faster Search and Smushed Bugs. “Local News America aggregates the RSS feeds of over 1000 local news sources and makes them searchable by keyword and/or browsable by state with links back to the original content. About a dozen topic feeds (including data centers, activism, and local / federal government) are also available. (The site doesn’t scrape the web […]

Calishat: Adding Two New Tools to SearchTweaks.com. “I don’t know about y’all but I am having my usual wild Friday night working on my search tools. I’ve just added two new tools to SearchTweaks.com; if you do any local news searching I think you’ll really like at least one of them. Like all of the site they are free to use and free of ads….SearchTweaks is a collection of 19 tools for […]

#Business #Outlooks
The future of the website · “Not dead. Not even close. But different.” https://ilo.im/16epyp

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#Websites #Authenticity #SearchEngines #SEO #AI #MCP #Design #WebDesign #Development #WebDev #Frontend

Calishat: Search by Year (1995+) and State News Sources: Peabody Search. “I made Peabody Search, named after Mr. Peabody and his Wayback Machine. He could set his time machine to go to a particular year and place, and that’s what this tool does as well (though it’s restricted to US states.) Peabody Search walks you through the process of setting the query, selecting the years, choosing a […]

Gizmodo: DuckDuckGo, Unable to Resist the Pull of AI, Mistakenly Claims Trump Died of Rabies. “President Donald Trump has passed away after succumbing to a rabies infection given to him by Vice President J.D. Vance, who also died of rabies. That news comes to us via the AI-generated search results provided by privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo.”

Calishat: Super Edu Search, Powered By Diffbot. “Super Edu Search 1.0 aggregated sets of domains and presented them as Google search URLs because I can’t afford Google’s search API and that was a free workaround. But Diffbot’s API is free and so I can integrate its search results into the tool…. Since this result integration seemed like it would be useful to researchers, I added the […]

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/06/03/google-tests-ai-search-controls-with-click-data-missing-xcxwbn/

Google is testing Search Console controls for AI Search, giving UK site owners an opt-out that cuts generative visibility but leaves click data missing.

#AI #SearchConsole #Google #GoogleSearch #SearchEngines #AISearch #AIMode #AIOverviews #Publishers

Calishat: Upgrading BlogHiking.com: More Results, Site Muting. “I spent some time over the weekend working on my blog search tool Blog Hiking. I’m happy to report it’s more powerful than before and has a couple of new features.”

Calishat: Three Search Alternatives to Google’s Brave New AI World. “Google has made what I consider to be the terrible decision to go all-in on AI in search and there’s little I can do personally against that decision. Still, I can make alternatives. I can express my ideas in tools that I share with you. I can at least try to hold space for the idea that there are ways to perform queries and […]

For years I've been writing that AI is essentially another stage of control over semantics. The power of philosopher kings (Plato) who create new myths.

A process that has accelerated... building internet gateways that filter meaning.

New piece on the expert's paradox and the facade of trustworthiness.

https://dadalo.pl/en/tech/ai-slop-expert-paradox-cognitive-biases/

#AI #epistemology #Google #bias #AIOverview #disinformation #criticalthinking #tech #SearchEngines

Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth - Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without d... - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/magazine/wikipedia-ai-chatgpt.html #encyclopaediabritannicainc #artificialintelligence #searchengines #encyclopedias #gettyimages #openailabs #wikipedia #googleinc #redditinc #chatgpt