#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 […]

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Groups Are Google’s No. 2 Forum Source. “A recent analysis by Ahrefs shows that public Facebook Groups are now the second most common site in Google’s Discussions and forums module, after Reddit. Facebook appears in 38.3% of the search results where the module shows up, with all Facebook URLs coming from public Groups.”

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Groups Are Google’s No. 2 Forum Source. “A recent analysis by Ahrefs shows that public Facebook Groups are now the second most common site in Google’s Discussions and forums module, after Reddit. Facebook appears in 38.3% of the search results where the module shows up, with all Facebook URLs coming from public Groups.”

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Groups Are Google’s No. 2 Forum Source. “A recent analysis by Ahrefs shows that public Facebook Groups are now the second most common site in Google’s Discussions and forums module, after Reddit. Facebook appears in 38.3% of the search results where the module shows up, with all Facebook URLs coming from public Groups.”

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Groups Are Google’s No. 2 Forum Source. “A recent analysis by Ahrefs shows that public Facebook Groups are now the second most common site in Google’s Discussions and forums module, after Reddit. Facebook appears in 38.3% of the search results where the module shows up, with all Facebook URLs coming from public Groups.”

Search Engine Journal: Facebook Groups Are Google’s No. 2 Forum Source. “A recent analysis by Ahrefs shows that public Facebook Groups are now the second most common site in Google’s Discussions and forums module, after Reddit. Facebook appears in 38.3% of the search results where the module shows up, with all Facebook URLs coming from public Groups.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google AI Overviews Pushing Searchers Into AI Mode, Drops Show More Button. Bleh. “Google Search has confirmed it is now pushing searchers into AI Mode from the AI Overview by default, without having to click the ‘Show more’ button. The new AI Overview experience that Google is testing shows a much fuller AI answer, like you’d get in AI Mode, and loads the follow up […]

Global News: Privacy watchdog takes Google to court over ‘right to be forgotten’ case. “Canada’s privacy commissioner is asking the Federal Court to order Google to de-list specific search results, after Google refused to comply with the watchdog’s recommendations. The privacy commissioner’s office said a year ago that Google wouldn’t implement its recommendation to de-list specific […]

Search Engine Land: Google’s August 2026 spam update hit rankings harder than normal. “Google’s spam update caused exceptional search disruption, with dramatic ranking losses across 20 industries, according to SE Ranking data. Google’s August 2026 spam update saw an 82% increase in top 10 URLs dropping out of the top 100 compared with a period without a confirmed ranking update, according […]

Reuters: Google changes spam policy in EU to avert antitrust fine. “The EU said ​that its monitoring showed that Google’s spam policy demoted news media ​and other publishers’ websites and content in Google search results, when those websites include content from commercial partners. Google said that from August 30 any manual actions ​taken to demote sites would not apply to users in […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Showing Fewer PDF Files. But Why?. “Google seems to be showing fewer and fewer PDF files, and when it does show PDF files, it seems not to show them from some pretty important sites, like IRS.gov, New York State, and some others. But in some cases we are seeing Google show PDF documents, without you having to explicitly filter for PDF file types.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Has A Special Dolly Parton Easter Egg 🦋. “To commemorate the life of Dolly Parton, Google has released a new easter egg in its search results. If you search for [Dolly Parton] within Google Search, you will see butterflies come up from the bottom of the screen up through the search results page.”

The Guardian: Tell us: do you think AI has made Google search better or worse?. “Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to […]

Private Internet Access: The Search Engine Privacy Index: What Every Search Engine Really Knows About You. “Interest in privacy-focused engines has particularly grown in recent years. After Google’s AI-heavy search changes in May 2026, DuckDuckGo reported a sharp rise in app installs across the U.S., peaking at 30.5% daily growth. That shift led us at Private Internet Access to review the […]

Common Crawl: August 2026 Crawl Archive Now Available. “The crawl archive for August 2026 is now available. The data was crawled between August 7th and August 20th, and contains 2.14 billion web pages (or 360 TiB of uncompressed content). Page captures are from 40.2 million hosts or 33.1 million registered domains and include 0.7 billion new URLs, not visited in any of our prior crawls.”

Search Engine Roundtable: Google August 2026 Spam Update Has Finished Rolling Out. “The Google August 2026 spam update is now done rolling out. It started on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at around 12:30 pm ET and completed on August 21, 2026 at 4:50 am ET. Despite some people feeling the update started soon, Google’s John Mueller said it did not.”

Mozilla Blog: A billion searches a year, now built in: Startpage comes to Firefox. “Startpage is now a built-in search option for Firefox users on desktop in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Android and iOS are coming soon. Whether you want to search with Startpage, or another preferred search engine, it’s as easy as opening your search settings, picking a default, […]

TechJuice: Google Officially Launches Pakistan Office in Landmark Digital Expansion. “Google has formally opened its local office in Pakistan, a move Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and company officials described as a major step toward deepening technology cooperation. The inauguration took place on Tuesday when a Google delegation, led by the Global Affairs Vice President of Google Wilson L […]

Search Engine Land: Google Search pauses AI-generated images within AI Overviews. “Google has paused an experiment within Google Search to create AI-generated images within AI Overviews for recipe results. Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, replied to this test minutes ago saying, ‘This was a small experiment we’re no longer running.'”

Search Engine Journal: Google Begins Rolling Out The August 2026 Spam Update. “Google has begun rolling out the August 2026 spam update, according to the Search Status Dashboard. The rollout applies globally and to all languages, and Google says it may take a few days to complete…. As of publication, Google hadn’t posted a blog article to go with the dashboard note. Its spam updates page […]

Stract is gone. You might remember me mentioning an open search engine called Stract that I was using for some search experiments a couple years ago. I went to check on an API question and found that the search engine had been taken down. The developer, Mikkel Denker, told me he took the site down in early June. I told him I appreciated the work he put into Stract. Small search engines aren’t […]

Search Engine Roundtable: Google AI Overviews With AI-Generated Images In The Wild. “A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in AI Overviews this week.”

PsyPost: Does Google Search favor a liberal view on immigration?. “Google search results for immigration topics tend to present an overall positive view of the issue, according to a recent analysis of Swedish search data. The research, published in Heliyon, found that while the links skew slightly positive, the search engine tends to place neutral, unpoliticized sources at the very top of the […]

"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

#Ecosia ( @ecosia ) und #Qwant ( @Qwant ) starten deutschen #Webindex | c't Magazin https://www.heise.de/news/Ecosia-und-Qwant-starten-deutschen-Webindex-11383500.html #DigitalSovereignty #SearchIndex #SearchEngine #SearchEngines #Suchmaschine #Suchmaschinen

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/

Politicians Are Trying to Change What Chatbots Say About Them

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/us/politics/chatbots-political-campaigns.html

Courthouse News Service: Federal judge’s ruling gives Yelp a leg up in antitrust case against Google. “A federal judge on Tuesday agreed to recognize another judge’s finding that Google has monopoly power in the internet search market. The ruling effectively gives Yelp a step up in its lawsuit against the tech giant, allowing it to skip discovery on the issue.”

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

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

Courthouse News Service: Yelp argues Google’s dominance in search market continues for now. “Yelp argued in a motion for partial summary judgment that it should be given in its favor based on issue preclusion from a September 2025 ruling. In that Washington, D.C., ruling from United States v. Google, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee, said Google must share its search […]

Pook-Emu Bee: Links For 06-04-26

https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/pook-emu-bee-links-for-06-04-26/

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: Social and Political Framing in Search Engine Results. “While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias—such as content prioritization, indexical bias, political polarization, and sources of bias—an important question remains underexplored: how do search engines and […]

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

#TIL that longstanding CC image search engine #PixaBay can now be used to search for other kinds of media, including music;

https://pixabay.com/music/

#CC #CCMusic #SearchEngines #CreativeCommons #search

Using Marginalia Search’s Backlink Search

Marginalia Search may well be the best open source independent search engine on the web. Here, we look at how it can be used to find backlinks to indexed domains.

https://thenewleafjournal.com/using-marginalia-searchs-backlink-search/

#MarginaliaSearch #SearchEngines #Backlinks #SmallWeb

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/03/25/openai-wants-chatgpt-on-uk-search-choice-screens-xcxwbn/

OpenAI Wants ChatGPT on UK Search Choice Screens

#AI #ChatGPT #Google #OpenAI #GoogleSearch #UnitedKingdom #CMA #AIRegulation #Regulation #GoogleChrome #Android #BigTech #SearchEngines #Chatbots #DefaultSearch

Reddit Accuses ‘Data Scraper’ Companies of Theft - In a lawsuit, Reddit pulled back the curtain on an ecosystem of start-ups that scrape Goo... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/technology/reddit-data-scrapers-perplexity-theft.html #copyrightsandcopyrightviolations #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #robberiesandthefts #perplexityaiinc #searchengines #corporations #socialmedia #innovation #openailabs #start-ups #googleinc #redditinc #serpapi

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 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

https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/blocking-independent-search-crawlers-07-17-25/

I read an interesting Hacker News comment by user dumbfounder (great username!) on Hacker News today. I excerpt the pertinent part below:

I created a search engine that crawled the web way back in 2003. I used a proper user agent that included my email address. I got SO many angry emails about my crawler, which played as nice as I was able to make it play. Which was pretty nice I believe. If it’s not Google people didn’t want it. That’s a good way to prevent anyone from ever competing with Google.

dumbfounder

I have had problems with bad crawlers (especially bad AI cralwers) on my sites. At the same time, dumbfounder highlights the reverse side of the coin. Many sites block good crawlers such as robots.txt-respecting crawlers for indepdent search engines. While all webmasters are free to control access to their sites as they see fit, allowing Google and other select big tech search crawlers while excluding small and independent search crawlers both limits search diversity and prevents people who may rely on small or niche search engines such as Mojeek, Marginalia, or Seznam from discovering potentially interesting writing. I previously published an article on this issue advocating for webmasters who want to support an open web and search engine diversity to ensure that good crawlers from independent search engines and directories can access their sites.

#bots #googleSearch #marginaliaSearch #mojeek #searchEngines #seznam

Search engines in a nutshell

#SearchEngines #Google #Bing #DuckDuckGo #ZoTop #SearxNG #Brave #Qwant #Startpage #SwissCows #Mojeek #Ecosia #Lilo #Stract #Marginalia #MullvadLeta #Kagi

https://www.jeey.net/google.html

Cloudflare Introduces Blocking of A.I. Scrapers By Default - The tech company’s customers can automatically block A.I. companies from exploiting their... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/technology/cloudflare-ai-data.html #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #cloudflareinc #searchengines #princematthew #openailabs #chatgpt

Cloudflare Introduces Blocking of A.I. Scrapers By Default - The tech company’s customers can automatically block A.I. companies from exploiting their... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/technology/cloudflare-introduces-default-blocking-of-ai-data-scrapers.html #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #cloudflareinc #searchengines #princematthew #openailabs #chatgpt